In this course, you'll explore how primary keys can be set up for the tables underlying your entities and how you can manage the configuration of individual columns in your database columns using JPA annotations. You'll learn how to perform create, read, update, and delete operations using the JPA entity manager. Once you're done with this course, you'll be able to structure your entities and their attributes based exactly on your specifications and perform basic storage and retrieval operations using JPA and Hibernate.

In this course, you'll explore how nested collections within an outer entity can be mapped using JPA. You'll implement mappings for collections of primitive types, embeddable objects, and collections of entities. You'll examine how JPA and Hibernate handle list, set, and map collections. Next, you'll relate how specific operations such as entity persistence, update, and removal can be cascaded from parent entities to child entities and illustrate how inheritance relationships in your code can be mapped to database tables. Once you're done with this course, you'll be able to use nested collections within your entities and also map inheritance relationships in your code to meaningful representations using tables.

In this course, you'll explore a variety of ways to execute queries using JPA. You'll run native queries, queries using JPQL, and queries using the Criteria API, which helps avoid syntax errors in your query specification. Next, you'll examine how you can have entity-specific callback methods that can be invoked at different stages in the entity's lifecycle. When you are done with this course, you'll be able to perform complex queries on your database tables and manage your entity's lifecycle in a very granular manner.

JPA, or the Java Persistence API, is focused on persistence. Persistence can refer to any mechanism by which Java objects outlive the applications that created them. JPA is not a tool, or a framework, or an actual implementation. In this course, you'll explore the basic ideas behind object-relational mapping, where entities and relationships expressed in an object-oriented framework are mapped to records and tables in a relational database. You'll examine the basic features of the JPA and Hibernate frameworks. You'll then practice how to get set up with the MySQL database, the MySQL Workbench, and Apache Maven to manage dependencies in your Java application.

In this course, you'll explore the various kinds of relationships that you might want to express using JPA annotations and how these relationships map to relational table design. You'll examine unidirectional as well as bidirectional one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many relationships. Once you're done with this course, you'll be able to model and express real-world relationships between your entities using JPA annotations. Finally, you'll learn how to finely manipulate how you want these relationships configured using underlying database tables.