I have a quick question about hibernate. Is it possible to get any metadata about the database from hibernate? i know it not really part of what an ORM tool is for, but i do have a need to check if a particular database schema exists and conforms to our data model. Does anyone know how this can be achieved with hibernate?

thanks

You can use native SQL for that.

See createSQLQuery()

Hi,

You can use like,

ClassMetadata meta = sessionFactory.getMetadata(ClassName.class);

Object[] prpValues = meta.getPropertyNames();

you can see more in hibernate documentation in section 10.12

persist_coder:

I think this metadata refers to hibernate metadata, i.e., the data defined on the mapping files (or annotations).

So if there is some table on the database not known to hibernate you can't get metadata from it...that is what teknorat is looking for, if i understood well...

This is the class metadata, right? That means it tells me nothing about the actual database. How do i confirm that the datasource points to a database that has a schema compatible with my hibernate mappings?

Maybe you want to take a look to

<property name="hbm2ddl.auto">validate</property>

not quite, but it has led me to the schema validator tool. This does pretty much what I want. The only problem is that the schema tools appear to do their own transaction management, but I can live with that.