I am using the hbm2ddl Ant task to generate DDL from a hibernate mapping file. I set the "drop" attribute to true so that it will generate drop statements if tables already exist. This works fine until one of my tables contains a foreign key constraint, at this point the generated DDL puts the drop foreign key constraint at the top of the DDL but doesn't check if the table already exists - this causes the DDL to fail the first time it is run against a clean DB which doesn't contain the tables. The generated DDL looks like so:

alter table track_metadata drop foreign key FKD6002AE1F90DF610;
drop table if exists track_metadata;

Is there no way the "alter table" statement can check for existence of the table before it tries to drop the foreign key?

I am using the 3.2.0 GA release of hibernate tools.

Hmmm, I see nobody has any thoughts on this, perhaps it should go into Jira as a bug? Seems like one to me....

sounds like a feature request - but what is the problem ? failed DML's in schemaexport/update are normally just ignored.

Well, whether they are ignored or not is configurable depending on what tool you are using to load the DDL. We would like to be able to stop on genuine DDL errors but have had to disable this to work around this issue. I'm happy to add it as a feature request in Jira....