Using Grails/Hibernate with old Databases. How to create missing functions?

Question

Hello again,

So Hibernate Supports the latest Version of Firebird, which is really great. But...

I got here an Firebird 1.5.2 Database. My Grails App using this Database via Hibernate...so far everything great.

My Apps sends Queries with Functions that are not known to my Database. For Example the Function LOWER, which is now supported in Firebird since 2.x.

My Question: Is it possible to get a special Hibernate Dialect for my Database? Currently i am using: dialect = "org.hibernate.dialect.FirebirdDialect"

How can i assist my Database handling this unknown Functions?

Answer 1

You could create your own dialect class by subclassing FirebirdDialect and overwriting all functions that should return different values.

For the simple case of needing to rename the function Hibernate is using for lower case, you could simply set the following in your Hibernate configuration:

hibernate.query.substitutions toLowercase=mylower

However, as Firebird 1.5 has no kind of toLowercase function, you would need to implement it yourself as described in the Firebird documentation.