When I try to persist an entity called "user" with JPA/hibernate it does not work. The table is not created and it is because user is a reserved word in postgresql. Is there any way other than na开发者_开发问答ming the table something else to make this work?

To quote an identifier, use back ticks:

@Table(name="`users`")

See this example from Hibernate's test suite:

https://github.com/hibernate/hibernate-orm/blob/master/hibernate-core/src/test/java/org/hibernate/test/quote/User.java#L31

Hibernate will automatically detect it and convert to the appropriate quote for the database you are using.

JPA supports the following syntax for specifying that the tablename must be used exactly as specified:

@Table(name="\"user\"")

Try using this annotation on your entity class and see if it does the trick. The backslashes are used to escape one set of double-quotes, so it looks kind of ugly.

I'd say that you should avoid having table names that are reserved words, with hibernate. Sure you can escape it, but it may cause problems in the future (in a query for example). So the safest way is to name the table another way - say users:

@Entity
@Table(name="users")
public class User {..}

As others said, user is a reserved word in SQL and Postgres.

Many databases have many reserved words, over a thousand the last time I tallied. So it is very easy to run into weird problem due to a reserved word collision.

Trailing underscore: user_

Here is the handiest tip I ever learned for SQL: Always append a trailing underscore to your names. I do this for table names, column names, index names, and so on.

The SQL spec specifically promises^† to never have a keyword or reserved word with a trailing underscore. This promise is oddly inserted into the spec with no context. But to me it screams out “Append underscore to all your names!”.

After adopting this rule, I discovered a pleasant secondary benefit. When I see the underscore in the code, in the comments, in issue-tracking, and in the emails, I always know we are referring specifically to the database item such as customer_ table versus the concept of “customer” or the class Customer in my Java code.

^† I cannot quote the SQL spec because it is copyright protected, unfortunately. In the SQL:2011 spec, read section 5.4 Names and identifiers under the heading Syntax Rules item 3, NOTE 111. In SQL-92 see section 5.2, item 11. Just searching for the word underscore will work.

PostgreSQL follows the ANSI standard for quoting object names, so you need to specify "user" as the tablename (including the double quotes)

SELECT *
FROM "user";

I don't know how you would tell hibernate to generate such a statement.

I strongly recommend you find a different name for your table, it will give you more problems that it's worth.

You can use schema name to refer to the user table. Use default public schema if you aren't using any specific one.

@Table(name="user", schema="public")