Hi,

*** my question (summarized) ***
Is it possible to create the database schema and then create the matching database instance, automatically via Hibernate (preferably using Annotations)?
If so, how?

*** my question (in more detail) ***
First of all, I'm very new to Hibernate (and quite inexperienced with relational schema design).
I have a dataset that I would like store in a relational database (MySQL).

I know the following already:
all columns/attributes in the dataset
types of all columns/attributes
relationships (e.g. one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many, none, etc.) between attributes

I don't know the following:
how to decompose my data into tables that conform to any type of Normal Form (I am an RDBMS beginner)
how to decompose my data into tables that are efficiently queried (although I think intuition goes a long way here)

What are the recommended methods of doing the following:
specifying the column/attributes (preferably programmatically)?
specifying the queries I will be running (I guess this is necessary for efficient schema generation)?
generating the schema, and the database instance, from these definitions?

Thanks in advance for any and all help!
Regards,
Alex

For the record, I've gone through this tutorial already, http://viralpatel.net/blogs/2011/11/introduction-to-hibernate-framework-architecture.html, so I have a basic understanding of how to write Annotated Hibernate classes to match a given schema... but I don't know how to go the other way, i.e. generate the schema and database from Hibernate classes