Where does JPA store its actual data entities?

Question

Where does JPA store its actual tables? I am using JSP with JPA in NetBeans 7.3.1 on Tomcat and need to backup entire projects including data. Where is the data located? Thank you.

Answer 1

JPA is just an interface specification and doesn't actually "do" or "store" anything; all of that is taken care of by the JPA provider. Most providers (such as Hibernate and EclipseLink) will use a SQL database as the backend, but DataNucleus in particular supports a very large array of backends, including NoSQL databases like BigTable and S3 and regular documents such as spreadsheets.

In your case, you need to look through your application's configuration and find where the DataSource is configured; this is probably either embedded in the war in a .properties file or specified in the Tomcat configuration for the application and made available via JNDI.