Inserting full objects into a database column

I have never seen the need for this, but I like to understand things in case I ever run across them “in the wild”. I did see it in a commercial ecommerce application in which the designers serialized an “Order” object into a BLOB in an Oracle database table column.

This avoided the overhead of a straight object relational mapper such as Hibernate or the ATG repository, so I guess that is a positive. In this case, they stored other columns such as the ORDER_ID for fast lookups, and then pulled the entire “object” back into the application server and de-serialized it.

Below is an example:

import java.sql.*;
import java.io.*;

public class Order implements Serializable {
  int id;
  int quantity;
  int productId;
  Order (int id, int quantity, int productId) {
    this.id = id;
    this.quantity = quantity;
    this.productId = productId;
  }
  public static void main(String args[]) {
    try {
      Connection con = DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:oracle:thin:foo/bar@dbhost:1521/dbservice");
      PreparedStatement pst = con.prepareStatement("insert into orders values(?)");
      for (int i = 1; i <= 1000; i++  ) {
        Order o = new Order(i,i,i);
        ByteArrayOutputStream baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
        ObjectOutputStream objOstream = new ObjectOutputStream(baos);
        objOstream.writeObject(o);
        pst.setBytes(1, baos.toByteArray());
        pst.execute();
        con.commit();
      }
    }
    catch(Exception e) {
      e.printStackTrace();
    }
  }
}

Pulling it out of the database was done in a similar fashion, but is not shown here.