Any of us who has programmed in a language that permits null references will have experienced what happens when you try to dereference one. Whether it results in a segfault or a NullPointerException, it’s always a bug. Tony Hoare described it as his billion-dollar mistake....
I prefer not to couple my entities (or data structures as I prefer to call them) to my database, neither via annotations nor via frameworks that use naming convention. I like to have total freedom to map whatever data in whatever format I have stored...
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