How can I use hibernate with MS Access?

Question

I want to use hibernate with MS Access. Which dialect should I use and can you give me a sample hibernate configuration file with MS Access?

Answer 1

You can use an other strategy and a free strategy to resolve this problem (HXTT is not free) :

http://www.programmingforfuture.com/2011/06/how-to-use-ms-access-with-hibernate.html

Personaly I got an exception when I try to reverse engineering the ms database (org.hibernate.exception.GenericJDBCException: Error while reading primary key meta data), yet it works for many people.

Answer 2

As a late note (commenting is not available for me): UCanAccess surely works, although I don't (yet) have experience with writing data. Anyways, regarding the dialect to use, I run with

            <property name="hibernate.dialect" value="org.hibernate.dialect.HSQLDialect"/>

because UCanAccess use HSQLDB, and I suppose that dialect is the best match. There isn't any sql actually hitting ms-access in the picture here, jackcess reads and writes directly to the access mdb-file, there is no microsoft code interpreting any sql anywhere, as far as I can understand, and therefore using SQLServerDialect will only confuse HSQLDB code trying to understand it.

Answer 3

For MS Access, you'll need the dialect from HXTT. You'll need to use the hibernate support package provided by HXTT. There is also a sample project that you can check for a fully working example.

Below, a sample minimal configuration:

# Hxtt Access dialect sample
hibernate.dialect=com.hxtt.support.hibernate.HxttAccessDialect
hibernate.connection.driver_class=com.hxtt.sql.access.AccessDriver
hibernate.connection.url=jdbc:access:///c:/yourAccessDirectory

PS: If MS Access is not a written in stone requirement, maybe you should consider using something else like... well, anything.

Answer 4

Actual solution here!

After spending 1 day trying out different solutions ODBC, HXTT, etc. I found this beauty :) http://ucanaccess.sourceforge.net/site.html.

It couldn't be any simpler: just add the jars from the site to your project libs and.

META-INF/persistence.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<persistence>
    <persistence-unit name="traderMandate">
        <provider>org.hibernate.ejb.HibernatePersistence</provider>
        <properties>
            <property name="hibernate.dialect" value="org.hibernate.dialect.SQLServerDialect" />
            <property name="hibernate.connection.url" value="jdbc:ucanaccess://C:/MY.accdb;" />
            <property name="hibernate.connection.driver_class" value="net.ucanaccess.jdbc.UcanaccessDriver"/>
            <property name="hibernate.archive.autodetection" value="class" />
        </properties>
    </persistence-unit>
</persistence>          

Spring config:

<bean id="entityManagerFactory" class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean">
    <property name="persistenceUnitName" value="traderMandate"/>
</bean>

<tx:annotation-driven/>

<bean id="transactionManager" class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.JpaTransactionManager">
    <property name="entityManagerFactory" ref="entityManagerFactory"/>
</bean>

And you're good to go. ;)

Answer 5

@Firstthumb. Sorry, this is not really an answer but just expressing a comment. I was in the same boat - considering using MS Access to develop a local tipping competition for the Football World Cup 2010. I could access MS Access directly using the Oledb but as a training exercise to reskill a bunch of Java developers moving to .NET, I wanted to show the usage of nHibernate as the DAO layer.

After investigating the non-availability of a robust and supported dialect from JBoss/Hibernate team and other considerations, I decided to forego the exercise on using MSAccess. I downloaded the free SQL Express 2008 instead.

For those who still want to use MSAccess in .NET, please see this link)