Using Hibernate 3 with annotations, when a unique constraint is removed from the entity annotations, the constraint is not dropped from the database. DDL generation is set to update - <property name="hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto" value="update"/>

The entity initially had @Column(unique = true) on the userName. I have removed the annotation and also set it to false. In both cases the constraint remains in the database (H2).

@Entity
public class User implements Serializable {
private Long id;
private String userName;

@Id
@GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.AUTO)
public Long getId() {
return id;
}

@Column(unique = false)
public String getUserName() {
return userName;
}

}

Is it reasonable to assume that the constraint would be dropped by the change in the annotation?

Thanks,

Greg

As far as I know the schema update tool can only add things to the database. It doesn't remove columns, tables, indexes or other stuff from the database.

Yes, hibernate does not remove definitions from the db. If you want the database to be as mapped in hibernate, drop it and let hibernate create it new.