We (the company I work for) wanted to implement Hibernate as our persistence layer, but I am having a little trouble find answers because of terminology...

I have a lot of questions about updating databases. We write software and when the software starts we check the database version (not the database software version) to make sure it is up to date. If not we run through a series of code to update database (adding tables, altering columns, inserting data, dropping tables).

Is there a term I should be searching for to bring up topics like this? Will Hibernate handle this type of database manipulation? Anyone know of any examples of this situation?

Hey. You might check out the 'validate' setting for the configuration property "hbm2dll.auto" -- its supposed to check that your hibernate meta-data model matches the existins schema in the database.

I took a look at that... and it seems that it will update the database by adding the columns / tables that need to be added. BUT... am I right in seeing that it will not drop tables / columns that are no longer needed?

Example:
Table: Employee
Columns: ID, Name

This worked fine for a while, but now we need to store First name and Last name separately... so we need it to look like...
Table Employee
Columns: ID, FirstName, LastName


Can hibernate handle this? should I be looking somewhere else?

I took a look at the DDL hibernate tool... and it seems rather nice...
but I need to accomplish the database 'refactor' in my application.

Does no other company deal with this issue?

I don't really know about this stuff cause I haven't used it, but the book says that you can also do that schema validation with code.

There's a class called SchemaValidator( Configuration conf ) that can provide some schema checking functionality.