Appendix B. Meta-Data Schema

Overview

The Spring Batch Meta-Data tables very closely match the Domain objects that represent them in Java. For example, JobInstance, JobExecution, JobParameters, and StepExecution map to BATCH_JOB_INSTANCE, BATCH_JOB_EXECUTION, BATCH_JOB_EXECUTION_PARAMS, and BATCH_STEP_EXECUTION, respectively. ExecutionContext maps to both BATCH_JOB_EXECUTION_CONTEXT and BATCH_STEP_EXECUTION_CONTEXT. The JobRepository is responsible for saving and storing each Java object into its correct table. The following appendix describes the meta-data tables in detail, along with many of the design decisions that were made when creating them. When viewing the various table creation statements below, it is important to realize that the data types used are as generic as possible. Spring Batch provides many schemas as examples, which all have varying data types due to variations in individual database vendors' handling of data types. Below is an ERD model of all 6 tables and their relationships to one another:

Example DDL Scripts

The Spring Batch Core JAR file contains example scripts to create the relational tables for a number of database platforms (which are in turn auto-detected by the job repository factory bean or namespace equivalent). These scripts can be used as is, or modified with additional indexes and constraints as desired. The file names are in the form schema-*.sql, where "*" is the short name of the target database platform. The scripts are in the package org.springframework.batch.core.

Version

Many of the database tables discussed in this appendix contain a version column. This column is important because Spring Batch employs an optimistic locking strategy when dealing with updates to the database. This means that each time a record is 'touched' (updated) the value in the version column is incremented by one. When the repository goes back to try and save the value, if the version number has change it will throw OptimisticLockingFailureException, indicating there has been an error with concurrent access. This check is necessary since, even though different batch jobs may be running in different machines, they are all using the same database tables.

Identity

BATCH_JOB_INSTANCE, BATCH_JOB_EXECUTION, and BATCH_STEP_EXECUTION each contain columns ending in _ID. These fields act as primary keys for their respective tables. However, they are not database generated keys, but rather they are generated by separate sequences. This is necessary because after inserting one of the domain objects into the database, the key it is given needs to be set on the actual object so that they can be uniquely identified in Java. Newer database drivers (Jdbc 3.0 and up) support this feature with database generated keys, but rather than requiring it, sequences were used. Each variation of the schema will contain some form of the following:

CREATE SEQUENCE BATCH_STEP_EXECUTION_SEQ;
CREATE SEQUENCE BATCH_JOB_EXECUTION_SEQ;
CREATE SEQUENCE BATCH_JOB_SEQ;

Many database vendors don't support sequences. In these cases, work-arounds are used, such as the following for MySQL:

CREATE TABLE BATCH_STEP_EXECUTION_SEQ (ID BIGINT NOT NULL) type=InnoDB;
INSERT INTO BATCH_STEP_EXECUTION_SEQ values(0);
CREATE TABLE BATCH_JOB_EXECUTION_SEQ (ID BIGINT NOT NULL) type=InnoDB;
INSERT INTO BATCH_JOB_EXECUTION_SEQ values(0);
CREATE TABLE BATCH_JOB_SEQ (ID BIGINT NOT NULL) type=InnoDB;
INSERT INTO BATCH_JOB_SEQ values(0);

In the above case, a table is used in place of each sequence. The Spring core class MySQLMaxValueIncrementer will then increment the one column in this sequence in order to give similar functionality.