Hi all,

I'm having a problem trying to make my application work with a combination of hibernate and Oracle database.

My Spring configuration indicates:

The value of the property "hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto" is "create".

And the result is that the database is recreated on each server startup, which results with the deletion of all data in the database which was there prior to the startup.

If I choose the value of "hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto" to be "update" then the database is not created at all on startup even if it doesn't exist.
The same behavior happens if I don't use the hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto flag at all.

Can someone help?
All I want is that the database will be created if it doesnt exist, and afterwards the data will not be deleted after startup.

By the way if my database is MySQL and I don't use the hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto flag at all then the behavior is fine: the DB is created only if doesn't exist and data isn't deleted. The wrong behavior happens only if my DB is Oracle.

Thanks,
Miro.

hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto has only 3 values.
## auto schema export
#hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto create-drop
#hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto create
#hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto update
#hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto validate

The best you can do is export the database first time before running the application using ANT task or using SchemaExport while building session factory.

You can SchemaExport with ANT tasks to validate and update database.

It is always advisable to turn off hbm2ddl.auto property in Production configuration. For Dev purpose, you can use either 'validate' or 'update'.