Sep 29, 2015

Tweaking Column Types in Grails

We had been working on this Grails 2 app for a few weeks and we were finally ready to put it on a test server (instead of running it like run-app locally). More importantly we were ready to point it away from an H2 database and to SQLServer. But then we ran into problems….

SQLServer doesn’t have a boolean type, but instead will use int. And we were using CLOBS and Hibernate was mapping them to text, which is deprecated in SQLServer in favor of nvarchar(max). And a lot of other little things. The CLOB was important to us because we were using that a lot in this app. And there was a bit difference on how H2 handled it as opposed to how SQLServer did.

After googling around the solution came to be to write your own Hibernate Dialiact. That sounded daunting but it actually wasn’t. This is what we came up with:

And then you have to tell Grails about it. In the DataSource.groovy add this to the SQLServer entries:

 dialect = com.foo.MySqlServerDialect

And that should be it.

About the Author

Mike Hostetler profile.

Mike Hostetler

Principal Technologist

Mike has almost 20 years of experience in technology. He started in networking and Unix administration, and grew into technical support and QA testing. But he has always done some development on the side and decided a few years ago to pursue it full-time. His history of working with users gives Mike a unique perspective on writing software.

One thought on “Tweaking Column Types in Grails

  1. Charl says:

    Very helpful, thanks!

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