Hibernate Enum mapping not creating mysql enum

Question

I'm currently using Hibernate with MySql. I'm trying to map an enum type, which according to several examples seems really straight forward.

However, the column that is generated contains a VARCHAR(255) rather than an enum type like it expected.

Here's the simple enum class.

public enum Gender {
 MALE,
 FEMALE
}

Here's the annotation

@Enumerated(EnumType.STRING)
@Column(name = "gender")
public Gender getGender() {
 return gender;
}

And here's the field that's generated from this

| gender | varchar(255) | NO | | NULL | |

I can't see why the type is a String rather than an enum. I've tried changing the Enum type to Ordinal, but then I just get an Integer rather than a string, still no enum.

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

I don't think it's possible because ENUM is not a standard SQL datatype. By default @Enumerated is mapped to integer, if EnumType.STRING is used then column is mapped to a string.

• DtechNet: Enum is a supported MySQL datatype - used here in a sample database. This article was recently updated - also links to MySQL documentation. www3.ntu.edu.sg/home/ehchua/programming/sql/… Also - this works stackoverflow.com/questions/1076604/…