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EntityManager.createNativeQuery returning list of objects instead of list of BigDecimal when using Pagination

I am trying to use Pagination with EntityManager.createNativeQuery(). Below is the skeleton code that I am using:
var query = em.createNativeQuery("select distinct id from ... group by ... having ...");
List<BigDecimal> results = query
.setMaxResults(pageSize)
.setFirstResult(pageNumber * pageSize)
.getResultList();
When pageNumber is 0 (first page), I get the expected List of BigDecimals:
But as soon as pageNumber > 0 (example, second page), I get a List of Objects, and each object in this list seems to contain two BigDecimals, the first of which contains the value from the db, and the second BigDecimal seems to be the position of this row.
and obviously I get this exception
java.lang.ClassCastException: class [Ljava.lang.Object; cannot be cast to class java.math.BigDecimal
Can someone please explain this discrepancy, and how this can be fixed to always return a List of BigDecimals? Thank you.
Update-1 : I have created a sample project to reproduce this issue. I was able to reproduce this issue only with an Oracle database. With H2 database, it worked fine, and I consistently got a list of BigDecimals irrelevant of the page number.
Update-2 : I have also created a sample project with H2 where it works without this issue.

The problem that you are running into is that your OracleDialect adds a column to its selected ResultSet. It wraps the query that you are running as discussed in SternK's answer.
If you were using the Hibernate SessionFactory and the Session interfaces, then the function that you would be looking for would be the "addScalar" method. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an implementation in pure JPA (see the question asked here: Does JPA have an equivalent to Hibernate SQLQuery.addScalar()?).
I would expect your current implementation to work just fine in DB2, H2, HSQL, Postgres, MySQL (and a few other DB engines). However, in Oracle, it adds a row-number column to the ResultSet which means that Hibernate gets 2 columns from the ResultSet. Hibernate does not implement any query parsing in this case, which means that it simply parses the ResultSet into your List. Since it gets 2 values, it converts them into an Object[] rather than a BigDecimal.
As a caveat, relying on the JDBC driver to provide the expected-data-type is a bit dangerous, since Hibernate will ask the JDBC driver which data-type it suggests. In this case, it suggests a BigDecimal, but under certain conditions and certain implementations would be allowed to return a Double or some other type.
You have a couple options then.
You can modify your oracle-dialect (as SternK) suggests. This will take advantage of an alternate oracle-paging implementation.
If you are not opposed to having hibnerate-specific aspects in your JPA implementation, then you can take advantage of additional hibernate functions that are not offered in the JPA standard. (See the following code...)
List<BigDecimal> results = entitymanager.createNativeQuery("select distinct id from ... group by ... having ...")
.unwrap(org.hibernate.query.NativeQuery.class)
.addScalar("id", BigDecimalType.INSTANCE)
.getResultList();
System.out.println(results);
This does have the advantage of explicitly telling hibnerate, that you are only interested in the "id" column of your ResultSet, and that hibernate needs to explicitly convert to the returned object to a BigDecimal, should the JDBC-driver decide that a different type would be more appropriate as a default.

The root cause of your problem in the way how the pagination implemented in your hibernate oracle dialect.
There are two cases:
When we have setFirstResult(0) the following sql will be generated:
-- setMaxResults(5).setFirstResult(0)
select * from (
select test_id from TST_MY_TEST -- this is your initial query
)
where rownum <= 5;
As you can see, this query returns exactly the same columns list as your initial query, and therefore you do not have problem with this case.
When we set setFirstResult in not 0 value the following sql will be generated:
-- setMaxResults(5).setFirstResult(2)
select * from (
select row_.*, rownum rownum_
from (
select test_id from TST_MY_TEST -- this is your initial query
) row_
where rownum <= 5
)
where rownum_ > 2
As you can see, this query returns the columns list with additional rownum_ column, and therefore you do have the problem with casting this result set to the BigDecimal.
Solution
If you use Oracle 12c R1 (12.1) or higher you can override this behavior in your dialect using new row limiting clause in this way:
import org.hibernate.dialect.Oracle12cDialect;
import org.hibernate.dialect.pagination.AbstractLimitHandler;
import org.hibernate.dialect.pagination.LimitHandler;
import org.hibernate.dialect.pagination.LimitHelper;
import org.hibernate.engine.spi.RowSelection;
public class MyOracleDialect extends Oracle12cDialect
{
private static final AbstractLimitHandler LIMIT_HANDLER = new AbstractLimitHandler() {
#Override
public String processSql(String sql, RowSelection selection) {
final boolean hasOffset = LimitHelper.hasFirstRow(selection);
final StringBuilder pagingSelect = new StringBuilder(sql.length() + 50);
pagingSelect.append(sql);
/*
see the documentation https://docs.oracle.com/database/121/SQLRF/statements_10002.htm#BABHFGAA
(Restrictions on the row_limiting_clause)
You cannot specify this clause with the for_update_clause.
*/
if (hasOffset) {
pagingSelect.append(" OFFSET ? ROWS");
}
pagingSelect.append(" FETCH NEXT ? ROWS ONLY");
return pagingSelect.toString();
}
#Override
public boolean supportsLimit() {
return true;
}
};
public MyOracleDialect()
{
}
#Override
public LimitHandler getLimitHandler() {
return LIMIT_HANDLER;
}
}
and then use it.
<property name="hibernate.dialect">com.me.MyOracleDialect</property>
For my test data set for the following query:
NativeQuery query = session.createNativeQuery(
"select test_id from TST_MY_TEST"
).setMaxResults(5).setFirstResult(2);
List<BigDecimal> results = query.getResultList();
I got:
Hibernate:
/* dynamic native SQL query */
select test_id from TST_MY_TEST
OFFSET ? ROWS FETCH NEXT ? ROWS ONLY
val = 3
val = 4
val = 5
val = 6
val = 7
P.S. See also HHH-12087
P.P.S I simplified my implementation of the AbstractLimitHandler by removing checking presents FOR UPDATE clause. I think we will not have nothing good in this case and with this checking.
For example for the following case:
NativeQuery query = session.createNativeQuery(
"select test_id from TST_MY_TEST FOR UPDATE OF test_id"
).setMaxResults(5).setFirstResult(2);
hibernate (with Oracle12cDialect) will generate the following sql:
/* dynamic native SQL query */
select * from (
select
row_.*,
rownum rownum_
from (
select test_id from TST_MY_TEST -- initial sql without FOR UPDATE clause
) row_
where rownum <= 5
)
where rownum_ > 2
FOR UPDATE OF test_id -- moved for_update_clause
As you can see, hibernate tries to fix query by moving FOR UPDATE to the end of the query. But anyway, we will get:
ORA-02014: cannot select FOR UPDATE from view with DISTINCT, GROUP BY, etc.

I've simulated your consult and everything works fine. I've used DataJpaTest to instance entityManager for me, h2 memory database and JUnit 5 to run the test. See below:
#Test
public void shouldGetListOfSalaryPaginated() {
// given
Person alex = new Person("alex");
alex.setSalary(BigDecimal.valueOf(3305.33));
Person john = new Person("john");
john.setSalary(BigDecimal.valueOf(33054.10));
Person ana = new Person("ana");
ana.setSalary(BigDecimal.valueOf(1223));
entityManager.persist(alex);
entityManager.persist(john);
entityManager.persist(ana);
entityManager.flush();
entityManager.clear();
// when
List<BigDecimal> found = entityManager.createNativeQuery("SELECT salary FROM person").setMaxResults(2).setFirstResult(2*1).getResultList();
// then
Assertions.assertEquals(found.size(), 1);
Assertions.assertEquals(found.get(0).longValue(), 1223L);
}
I suggest that you review your native query. It's preferable that you use Criteria API instead and let native queries for extreme cases like complex consults.
Update
After the author posted the project, I could reproduce the problem and it was related to the oracle dialect. For unknown reason the query which is running for the second call is: select * from ( select row_.*, rownum rownum_ from ( SELECT c.SHOP_ID FROM CUSTOMER c ) row_ where rownum <= ?) where rownum_ > ?, and that's why this is generating a bug, because it's querying 2 columns instead of only one. The undesired one is this rownum. For other dialects there is no such problem.
I suggest you try other oracle dialect version and whether none of them work, my final tip is try to do the pagination yourself.

After a lot of trails with different versions of different spring libraries, I was finally able to figure out the issue. In one of my attempts, the issue seems to have disappeared, as soon as I updated the spring-data-commons library from v2.1.5.RELEASE to v2.1.6.RELEASE. I looked up the changelog of this release, and this bug, which is related to this bug in spring-data-commons, is the root cause of this issue. I was able to fix the issue after upgrading the spring-data-commons library.

UpdateString not implemented by SQLite JDBC driver

I have a table PERSON with more than 5 millions rows and I need to update field NICKNAME on each one of them based on the field NAME inside the same table.
ResultSet rs = statement.executeQuery("select NAME from PERSON");
while(rs.next())
{
// some parsing function like:
// Nickname = myparsingfunction(rs.getString("NAME"));
rs.updateString( "NICKNAME", Nickname );
rs.updateRow();
}
But I got this error:
not implemented by SQLite JDBC driver
I'm using sqlite-jdbc-3.8.11.2.jar downloaded at https://bitbucket.org/xerial/sqlite-jdbc/downloads.
I know I could use the following SQL query:
statement.executeUpdate("update PERSONS set NICKNAME = Nickname where ID = Id");
But that would take forever and I understand updating ResultSet would be faster. So what options do I have to update the table on the fastest way? Any other driver available? Should I move out of Java?
UPDATE
I was able to find a fast solution using below syntax. The block between CASE and END was a concatenated string that I built before executing the SQL query, so I could send all updates at once.
update PERSON
set NICKNAME= case ID
when 173567 then 'blabla'
when 173568 then 'bleble'
...
when 173569 then 'blublu'
end
where ID in (173567, 173568, 173569)

As you have encountered, the SQLite JDBC driver does not currently support the updateString operation. This can be seen in the source code for this driver.
I can think of three options:
As you stated in your question, you can select the name and ID of the person and then update the person by its ID. Those updates could be done in a batch (using PreparedStatement.addBatch()) to improve performance (tutorial).
Implement the method myparsingfunction in pure SQL so that the query could become UPDATE PERSONS SET NICKNAME = some_function(NAME).
Create an user-defined function (using org.sqlite.Function), implemented in Java, and call it inside the SQL. Example, taken from this answer:
Function.create(db.getConnection(), "getNickName", new Function() {
protected void xFunc() throws SQLException {
String name = value_text(0);
String nickName = ...; // implement myparsingfunction here
result(nickName);
}
});
and use it like this: UPDATE PERSONS SET NICKNAME = getNickName(NAME);
SQLite does not support stored procedures so that option is out of the table.
I'm not sure which of these options would provide the best performance (certainly using pure SQL would be faster but that may not be a viable solution). You should benchmark each solution to find the one that fits you.

How to use Hibernate to query a MySQL database with indexes

I have an application developed based on MySQL that is connected through Hibernate. I used DAO utility code to query the database. Now I need optimize my database query by indexes. My question is, how can I query data through Hibernate DAO utility code and make sure indexes are used in MySQL database when queries are executed. Any hints or pointers to existing examples are appreciated!
Update: Just want to make the question more understandable a little bit. Following is the code I used to query the MySQL database through Hibernated DAO utility codes. I'm not directly using HQL here. Any suggestions for a best solution? If needed, I will rewrite the database query code and use HQL directly instead.
public static List<Measurements> getMeasurementsList(String physicalId, String startdate, String enddate) {
List<Measurements> listOfMeasurements = new ArrayList<Measurements>();
Timestamp queryStartDate = toTimestamp(startdate);
Timestamp queryEndDate = toTimestamp(enddate);
MeasurementsDAO measurementsDAO = new MeasurementsDAO();
PhysicalLocationDAO physicalLocationDAO = new PhysicalLocationDAO();
short id = Short.parseShort(physicalId);
List physicalLocationList = physicalLocationDAO.findByProperty("physicalId", id);
Iterator ite = physicalLocationList.iterator();
while(ite.hasNext()) {
PhysicalLocation physicalLocation = (PhysicalLocation)ite.next();
List measurementsList = measurementsDAO.findByProperty("physicalLocation", physicalLocation);
Iterator jte = measurementsList.iterator();
while(jte.hasNext()){
Measurements measurements = (Measurements)jte.next();
if(measurements.getMeasTstime().after(queryStartDate)
&& measurements.getMeasTstime().before(queryEndDate)) {
listOfMeasurements.add(measurements);
}
}
}
return listOfMeasurements;
}

Just like with SQL, you don't need to do anything special. Just execute your queries as usual, and the database will use the indices you've created to optimize them, if possible.
For example, let's say you have a HQL query that searches all the products that have a given name:
select p from Product where p.name = :name
This query will be translated by Hibernate to SQL:
select p.id, p.name, p.price, p.code from product p where p.name = ?
If you don't have any index set on product.name, the database will have to scan the whole table of products to find those that have the given name.
If you have an index set on product.name, the database will determine that, given the query, it's useful to use this index, and will thus know which rows have the given name thanks to the index. It willl thus be able to only read a small subset of the rows to return the queries data.
This is all transparent to you. You just need to know which queries are slow and frequent enough to justify the creation of an index to speed them up.

What's the fastest way to check if a row exists in DB using Hibernate & spring?

I need to check if a row exists in a database in a very fast way.
Let's say I've got the primary key.
I found this code snippet in Hibernate's FAQ website:
Integer count = (Integer) session.createQuery("select count(*) from ....").uniqueResult();
I just started using spring, so I have HibernateTemplate object injected into my class.
How do I translate this snippet to work with HibernateTemplate.
Does anyone knows a better/faster way than this ?
Thanks.

Long count = hibernateTemplate.execute(new HibernateCallback<Long>() {
#Override
public Long doInHibernate(Session session) {
return (Long) session.createQuery("select count(someEntity.id) from SomeEntiuty someEntity ...").uniqueResult();
}
});
Hibernate used Integer for count queries before, but now uses Long. Also, note that even if not deprecated, Spring recommends not to use HibernateTemplate anymore and use the Hibernate API directly (using sessionFactory.getCurrentSession()).

Fastest way of checking primary key exist or not in database.
public void exist(Long id) {
Session session = sessionFactory.getCurrentSession();
String queryString = "select 1 from Employee e where e.id= :id";
Query query = session.createQuery(queryString);
query.setParameter("id", 1l);
Integer result = (Integer) query.uniqueResult();
System.out.println(result);
}

Again this also depends on a lot on what engine that you are using MyISAM vs innodb.
select count(col1) from table; will return the number of rows where the column is not null.
select count(*) from table; will return the number of rows.
Depending upon the database that you are using , a select count(*) will be more expensive than reading it from meta data table or system level tables that keep track of the row count.
Just my 2 cents.
Depending upon various other factors like indexes and other information / joins / access privileges this may be faster
SELECT table_rows FROM `information_schema`.`TABLES` where table_schema = 'database_schema_name' and table_name = 'table_name';

I think it's better to get an specific representative field of the first row found (using the PK or at least another indexed field), than counting all of the possible records that would match your search criteria.
If you're using Spring it will throw EmptyResultDataAccessException if no record was found.

Atomically fetch and increase sequence value in MySql

I convert the DB from Oracle to MySQL.
I'm using both Java & Hibernate.
When I used oracle I had the following method that gave me a brand new and unused sequence value:
protected int getSequenceNextValue() {
Session session = sessionFactory.getCurrentSession();
Query query = session.createSQLQuery("select MY_SEQUENCE.NEXTVAL from DUAL");
return ((BigDecimal) query.uniqueResult()).intValueExact();
}
And I'm trying to refactor this method to work on MySQL DB.
I have a table in MySQL that I use as a sequence (through Hibernate):
create table MY_SEQUENCE(
next_val int(10) NOT NULL
);
Is there any thread safe way to get a new value from this table and in the same transction to increase it?
For most cases I use the Hibernate Generator to generate a new sequence using this table, but in several cases I need to do it manually.
The best solution for me will be a refactoring of the method above, in such way that threads that querying the table at the same time will not fail, but will wait for each other.
Thanks...

Have a look at the InnoDB table type and FOR UPDATE. An example similar to what you describe is in the MySQL manual here http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/innodb-locking-reads.html