I am using annotations, and using them to generate the DDL based on my POJOs.

I have to say that Hibernate's schema drop/create and update is great for development. What I am wondering is how people plan/are planning to use the schema update feature for production.

I am leery of simply doing a schema update on a live system. Is it possible for Hibernate to connect to a live DB, compare the metadata, and generate a SQL update script which can be human-reviewed?

in theory it should just work like that, but if i remember correctly schemaupdate have not properly implemented "to file" yet...patches welcome.