Hibernate creating redundant many-to-many tables

Question

While developing my Spring Boot application I had to drop my database and have Hibernate generate it again with hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto=update. After that I want

Answer 1

What you have here is a bidirectional association in which both sides are owners, turning it basically to two independent associations. In a one-to-many association the owner is usually the many-to side (note the mappedBy attribute):

OneToMany(fetch = FetchType.EAGER, targetEntity = Skill.class, mappedBy = "parent")
@Cascade({CascadeType.DETACH})
private Set children;

This way Hibernate will ignore one-to side when maintaining the relationship (and will not create the join table which is the default configuration for @OneToMany association without @JoinColumn).