How to map a PostgreSQL array with Hibernate

Maven dependency

The first thing you need to do is to set up the following Hibernate Types Maven dependency in your project pom.xml configuration file:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.vladmihalcea</groupId>
    <artifactId>hibernate-types-52</artifactId>
    <version>${hibernate-types.version}</version>
</dependency>

Assuming you have this table in your database:

create table event (
    id int8 not null, 
    version int4, 
    sensor_names text[], 
    sensor_values integer[], 
    primary key (id)
)

And you want to map it like this:

@Entity(name = "Event")
@Table(name = "event")
@TypeDefs({
    @TypeDef(
        name = "string-array", 
        typeClass = StringArrayType.class
    ),
    @TypeDef(
        name = "int-array", 
        typeClass = IntArrayType.class
    )
})
public static class Event extends BaseEntity {
 
    @Type( type = "string-array" )
    @Column(
        name = "sensor_names", 
        columnDefinition = "text[]"
    )
    private String[] sensorNames;
 
    @Type( type = "int-array" )
    @Column(
        name = "sensor_values", 
        columnDefinition = "integer[]"
    )
    private int[] sensorValues;
 
    //Getters and setters omitted for brevity
}

The string-array and int-array are custom types which can be defined in the BaseEntity superclass:

@TypeDefs({
    @TypeDef(
        name = "string-array", 
        typeClass = StringArrayType.class
    ),
    @TypeDef(
        name = "int-array", 
        typeClass = IntArrayType.class
    )
})
@MappedSuperclass
public class BaseEntity {

    @Id
    private Long id;

    @Version
    private Integer version;

    //Getters and setters omitted for brevity
}

The StringArrayType and IntArrayType are classes offered by the Hibernate Types project.

Testing time

Now, when you insert a couple of entities;

Event nullEvent = new Event();
nullEvent.setId(0L);
entityManager.persist(nullEvent);
 
Event event = new Event();
event.setId(1L);
event.setSensorNames(
    new String[] {
        "Temperature", 
        "Pressure"
    }
);
event.setSensorValues( 
    new int[] {
        12, 
        756
    } 
);
entityManager.persist(event);

Hibernate is going to generate the following SQL statements:

INSERT INTO event (
    version, 
    sensor_names, 
    sensor_values, 
    id
) 
VALUES (
    0, 
    NULL(ARRAY), 
    NULL(ARRAY), 
    0
)
     
INSERT INTO event (
    version, 
    sensor_names, 
    sensor_values, 
    id
) 
VALUES ( 
    0, 
    {"Temperature","Pressure"}, 
    {"12","756"}, 
    1
)

Hibernate does not support database arrays (e.g. ones mapped to java.sql.Array) out of the box.

array and primitive-array types provided by Hibernate are for mapping Java arrays into backing table - they're basically a variation of one-to-many / collection-of-elements mappings, so that's not what you want.

Latest PostgreSQL JDBC driver (8.4.whatever) supports JDBC4 Connection.createArrayOf() method as well as ResultSet.getArray() and PreparedStatement.setArray() methods, though, so you can write your own UserType to provide array support.

Here is a UserType implementation dealing with Oracle array that provides a good starting point, it's reasonably straightforward to adapt it to handle java.sql.Array instead.