Hi all !

I'm in the process of deciding which of the OR mapping tools to use. Currently I'm deciding between Hibernate, TopLink and Apache OJB.

What I need to know is if Hibernate already has functionality/3rd party tools, whatever, to automatically generate DDL files based on the changes in the model, to keep the customers database synchronized with model.

Example:
We release a product using Hibernate. Then after few weeks we add new classes and attributes, remove some classes. When we want to publish these changes, changes in customers database are required and an appropriate DDL must be created. Can Hibernate somehow assist in doing this or must one do it by hand.

Thank you very much !

you can use middlegen as explained in the reference doc.
You'll find a description in the reference guide

Thats rather a Job for SchemaUpdate, anthony :) Note that this is not always possible and depends heavily on the metadata of your JDBC-Driver.

Middlegen as I understand it, is used to generate a complete mapping (model) from an existing database. But if we develop a project from scratch, we already have a model. What we need is a generated DDL that will update customers database to the current model, as explained above.

the main info was:" read about tools in the doc" lol

sorry for this error