Connecting Spring Boot with databases - MySQL and Oracle

This guide will help you understand how to connect Spring Boot with databases like MySql and Oracle.

You will learn

  • How to connect Spring Boot, JPA application with MySQL and Oracle?
  • What should you configure in application.properties?
  • How to setup the database schema?

Updating the Spring Boot Project Step By Step

Let’s look at the 5 steps involved in connecting a Spring Boot application to a database.

You can use the example we created earlier for connecting to H2 in memory database as the starting point for this article- http://www.springboottutorial.com/hibernate-jpa-tutorial-with-spring-boot-starter-jpa

Step 1 - Add dependency for your database connector to pom.xml

Example for MySQL is shown below.

<dependency>
    <groupId>mysql</groupId>
    <artifactId>mysql-connector-java</artifactId>
</dependency>

If you would want to connect to oracle database, you can use a dependency similar to the one shown below.

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.oracle</groupId>
    <artifactId>ojdbc7</artifactId>
    <version>12.1.0.1</version>
</dependency>

Step 2 - Remove H2 Dependency from pom.xml

Or atleast make its scope as test

<!--
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.h2database</groupId>
    <artifactId>h2</artifactId>
    <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
-->

Step 3 - Setup your My SQL Database

We would need to set up your database with a schema and the tables.

Step 4 - Configure your connection to Your Database

Configure application.properties to connect to your database.

An example for My SQL is shown below:

spring.jpa.hibernate.ddl-auto=none
spring.datasource.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/todo_example
spring.datasource.username=todouser
spring.datasource.password=YOUR_PASSWORD

spring.jpa.hibernate.ddl-auto

Spring Boot chooses a default value for this based on whether you are connecting to an embedded database or not.

  • Embedded Databases - default create-drop
  • Other Databases - default none

Here is a quick guide to all the options

  • none : No action will be performed.
  • create-only : Database creation will be generated from entities.
  • drop : Database dropping will be generated from entities.
  • create : Database dropping will be generated followed by database creation.
  • validate : Validate entites with the database schema
  • update : Update the database schema based on the entities

Step 5 - Restart and You are ready!

That’s it

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