native generator class in hibernate

Question

I have this part of hibernate mapping xml file, and I was looking for a good example for what does native mean.

Answer 1

Native means Your generator will use identity or sequence columns according to what your current database support.

Docs explained about each strategy here

http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/orm/3.3/reference/en/html/mapping.html#mapping-declaration-id

native

selects identity, sequence or hilo depending upon the capabilities of the underlying database.

assigned

lets the application assign an identifier to the object before save() is called. This is the default strategy if no element is specified.

For example: In Mysql if you have primary key column as a auto_increment, the db will be updated using this strategy

Answer 2

And to complete what Suresh Atta said, you can name the sequence:

<hibernate-mapping>
 <class name="com.hib.Task" table="tasks">
  <id name="id" type="int" column="id" >
   <generator class="native">
     <param name="sequence">s_tasks</param>
   </generator>
  </id>

So it will either work for IDENTITY and for SEQUENCE incremented primary key.