Spring Data doesn't seem to understand #Column name - mysql

Question

I'm using Spring-boot 1.4.1.RELEASE, with Spring Data and Hibernate to persist some data into a MySQL database.
I have this class, Respondent, annotated with #Entity and one of the fields annotated as below:
#Column(name = "firstName", nullable = false, length = 100)
private String firstName;
When I try to save a Respondent to the DB by calling save() on its CrudRepository<Respondent, Long>, I get this error:
ERRORcom.mysql.jdbc.exceptions.jdbc4.MySQLSyntaxErrorException: Unknown column 'first_name' in 'field list'
This error had started occurring before I had the #Column annotation for the field, so I thought it was some default Hibernate behaviour to map firstName to first_name, but I've added the #Column annotation to it and nothing changed. Is it still wrong? I've already rebuilt the application with mvn clean package.
Here's my Respondent entity:
#Entity
public class Respondent {
#Id
#GeneratedValue(strategy=GenerationType.AUTO)
private Long id;
#Column(name = "firstName", nullable = false, length = 100)
private String firstName;
private String tussenvoegsel;
#Column(name = "lastName", nullable = false, length = 100)
private String lastName;
#ManyToOne(fetch = FetchType.LAZY)
#JoinColumn(name = "Company_id", nullable = false)
private Company company;

Answer 1

By default Spring uses jpa.SpringNamingStrategy to generate the table names.
The ImprovedNamingStrategy will convert CamelCase to SNAKE_CASE where as the EJB3NamingStrategy just uses the table name unchanged.
You can try to change the naming_strategy to:
spring.jpa.hibernate.naming_strategy=org.hibernate.cfg.EJB3NamingStrategy
or the #Column name attribute should be in lowercase #Column(name = "firstname")
For Hibernate 5 this should work (I am not quite sure if you also need the above one. But try it with both):
spring.jpa.hibernate.naming.implicit-strategy=org.hibernate.boot.model.naming.ImplicitNamingStrategyLegacyJpaImpl
spring.jpa.hibernate.naming.physical-strategy=org.hibernate.boot.model.naming.PhysicalNamingStrategyStandardImpl

Answer 2

There we need to follow some naming strategy.
The column name should be in lowercase or uppercase.
#Column(name="FIRSTNAME")
private String firstName;
or
#Column(name="firstname")
private String firstName;
keep in mind that, if you have your column name "first_name" format in the database then you have to follow the following way
#Column(name="firstName")
private String testName;