Any non-trivial Java EE application will persist data to a relational database. In this chapter, we will cover how to connect to a database and perform CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations.

The Java Persistence API (JPA) is the standard Java EE Object Relational Mapping (ORM) tool. We will discuss this API in detail in this chapter.

Some of the topics covered in this chapter include:

• Retrieving data from a database through JPA
• Inserting data into a database through JPA
• Updating data in a database through JPA
• Deleting data in a database through JPA
• Building queries programmatically through the JPA Criteria API
• Automating data validation through JPA 2.0's Bean Validation support