Persisting Joda DateTime instead of Java Date in Hibernate

Question

My entities currently contain java Date properties. I\'m starting to use Joda Time for date manipulation and calculations quite frequently. This means that I\'m constantly hav

Answer 1

Dates shouldn't be stored using a high level of abstraction like, say, a string ("2009-08-07 07:43:19 ...") nor as Java objects. They should be persisted as milliseconds since the epoch. Both Joda time and the regular Java date time can give you the time in milliseconds since the epoch. Store the number of milliseconds elapsed and convert back to objects when you're reading back from your DB.

Persisting heavyweight Date objects instead of a long is a bit like using floating point numbers to represent monetary amounts: it's typically a huge code smell.