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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-21T07:30:40+00:00

During the development of a JPA application, I added a field type to an

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During the development of a JPA application, I added a field “type” to an entity. This caused the application to fail to start with

Caused by: Exception [EclipseLink-4002] (Eclipse Persistence Services - 2.0.2.v20100323-r6872): org.eclipse.persistence.exceptions.DatabaseException
Internal Exception: java.sql.SQLSyntaxErrorException: Column 'T1.TYPE' is either not in any table in the FROM list or appears within a join specification and is outside the scope of the join specification or appears in a HAVING clause and is not in the GROUP BY list. If this is a CREATE or ALTER TABLE  statement then 'T1.TYPE' is not a column in the target table.
Error Code: -1

during a selection.

Is there a way to get it to ALTER TABLE on startup, to match the current entity definitions?
I notice that when the app starts up it calls CREATE TABLE for each table, fails and carries on.

In the past when I’ve added fields to entities I just delete the database and start again. This is ok for me now but what if I want to add a field to an entry when developing the next release of the software, how do I upgrade my clients without losing all there data?

Thanks in advance – Phil.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Generally speaking, the database generators of JPA providers are not reliable for creating and updating production databases. Suppose that in version 1 you had a field named name for your User entity and in version 2 you replace that with firstName and lastName. In such cases the DB generator is unable to migrate your schema correctly.

    In other words, the JPA provider’s automatic DB generation is only useful for development and not for production.

    Instead, you can consider using a database migration tool like LiquiBase.

    Having said that, while EclipseLink does not support a way for updating, rather than re-creating, tables using the eclipselink.ddl-generation property, some other JPA providers (e.g. Hibernate) support updating of the database tables. However, they can not be relied on for production use as they fail in cases like the given example.

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