The Spring applications generated by Skyway Builder leverage the Java Persistence API (JPA) for simplifying the persistence model.  If you are using Community Edition (open source) then the applications are automatically configured to use Hibernate as the JPA provider. With the additional automation available in Enterprise Edition, the developer can pick from multiple JPA providers, and the application will be automatically configured accordingly.

While JPA provides many benefits, there are occasions where SQL is preferred.  With Skyway Builder you are not locked into using JPA.  For that matter you don’t even have to use any of the automation or code generation related to persistence that’s provided by Skyway Builder.  You can certainly choose to leverage your own persistence model with the Spring applications you develop with Skyway Builder.  Nevertheless Skyway Builder supports the use of SQL, but Skyway Builder 6.2 will provide some additional code generation and automation relating to SQL.

There are several options for defining queries in Skyway Builder 6.2:

1. JPQL – for specifying queries using the JPA specific syntax. The persisted objects are managed by JPA.
2. SQL – for specifying queries to the underlying DB using SQL syntax. This option is usefull for queries that are syntactically specific to the underlying DB and intended to be executed using JDBC. This option does not use JPA.
3. JPA Native – for specifying queries to underlying DB using SQL syntax (similar to SQL option), but the resulting data will be synchronized into the persisted Objects that JPA is managing.

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