8.1. Integrating legacy databases

In this section, we hope to cover all the things you may encounter when you have to deal with an existing legacy database or (and this is often synonymous) a weird or broken schema. If your development process is top-down, however, you may want to skip this section. Furthermore, we recommend that you first read all chapters about class, collection, and association mappings before you attempt to reverse-engineer a complex legacy schema.

We have to warn you: When your application inherits an existing legacy database schema, you should usually make as few changes to the existing schema as possible. Every change that you make to the schema could break other existing applications that access the database. Possibly ...

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