Question

We have a requirement for persisting, using Hibernate, versioned Java objects into an Oracle database such that each version has a valid-from and valid-until timestamp. This is so we can query for objects as-at a specific time.

Does Hibernate or Oracle 11g (or anything else) provide anything that would simplify this?

Answer 1

Have a look at Hibernate Envers

The Envers project aims to enable easy auditing/versioning of persistent classes. All that you have to do is annotate your persistent class or some of its properties, that you want to audit, with @Audited. For each audited entity, a table will be created, which will hold the history of changes made to the entity. You can then retrieve and query historical data without much effort.