Hibernate – Auto Increment A Column With Hibernate

Looking for answers to this problem, I stumbled upon this link

It seems that Hibernate/JPA isn't able to automatically create a value for your non-id-properties. The @GeneratedValue annotation is only used in conjunction with @Id to create auto-numbers.

The @GeneratedValue annotation just tells Hibernate that the database is generating this value itself.

The solution (or work-around) suggested in that forum is to create a separate entity with a generated Id, something like this:

@Entity
public class GeneralSequenceNumber {
  @Id
  @GeneratedValue(...)
  private Long number;
}

@Entity 
public class MyEntity {
  @Id ..
  private Long id;

  @OneToOne(...)
  private GeneralSequnceNumber myVal;
}

From the community documentation:

hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto Automatically validates or exports schema DDL to the database when the SessionFactory is created. With create-drop, the database schema will be dropped when the SessionFactory is closed explicitly.

e.g. validate | update | create | create-drop

So the list of possible options are,

• validate: validate the schema, makes no changes to the database.
• update: update the schema.
• create: creates the schema, destroying previous data.
• create-drop: drop the schema when the SessionFactory is closed explicitly, typically when the application is stopped.
• none: does nothing with the schema, makes no changes to the database

These options seem intended to be developers tools and not to facilitate any production level databases, you may want to have a look at the following question; Hibernate: hbm2ddl.auto=update in production?