Creating a column in the table – @Column

In the previous recipe, you learned how to create a table in the database with attributes. Now, we will take a look at how to declare a column in the table with some useful options.

How to do it…

First of all, we take a basic example of creating a column:

1. We will first create a column with the name empCode in the employee table. As no information is provided for the column name, hibernate uses a variable name. Enter the following code:

   @Entity
   public class Employee {
       @Column
       private String empCode;
   
       // fields and getter/setter
   
   }

2. If we need a custom column name, we can use the name attribute, as shown in the following code:

   @Column(name="emp_code")
   private String empCode;

Now, hibernate will create a column with the name "emp_code".

There's more…

Let's take a look at some useful attributes available for the @Column annotation.

length

The length attribute is used to provide the column with a maximum size.

Here is an example:

@Column(name="emp_code"...