Schema auto generation creates columns in alphabetical order for compound primary keys -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Key: HIBERNATE-112 URL: https://issues.jboss.org/browse/HIBERNATE-112 Project: Hibernate Integration Issue Type: Bug Environment: JBoss AS 5.0.1 with EJB3 entities / Hibernate with MySQL Server 5.1 Reporter: Jochen Reinhardt Assignee: Steve Ebersole Schema auto generation creates columns in alphabetical order. I would not mind that, but it also affects the creation of primary key indexes. These are rather useless from a database point of view, as the database will only be able to use an index for searching if the columns that are searched for are a prefix of the key. Alphabetical column order is not what one expects. Instead, I would want that my columns are sorted in the same way they appear in my annotated POJO class. I hope I am not missing some simple configuration issue... I have a rather complex setup with my entities and relations, using compound primary keys and references. In an entity that maps a complex m:n relationship between two entities with additional properties... Please let me know if you need more details. I'm using @Embedded on a primary key class and @EmbeddedId in all my entities. I already posted in the Hibernate forums, but I did not get an answer yet, nor did I find any information about my specific problem. The only peace of information I found so far is, that the alphabetical column sort order was introduced because of some issues related to foreign key constraints in clustered environments. As it is already somewhat urgent, I decided to submit a bug report. A colleague of mine found the following in some other forum and I looked up in the source code, too - it's still there. But I do not know if it is correct in general and it only does not work for my setup. Cite: Hi all, I am using EJB3 with hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto=update. I notice the primary keys is been created in database in alphabetic order and not like the order defined at the embedded class. I look at the source code of Hibernate Annotations and found in AnnotationBinder class a Collections.sort at line 1024 with this comment: //order so that property are used in the same order when binding native query In my project I have primary keys with 4 or 5 fields, and many queries use only 2 ou 3 of them and are running very slow, and the cause was the wrong order of the primary keys in the database. I guest that sort is for fixing another bug, but is really annoying, because I need to look each primary key and adjust its order by hand. Is there another solution? Thanks in advance.