Originally posted by Paul Sturrock:
Shcema file? This is not something I'm familiar with. Different databases have ways of restoring the schema only, but these are database specific and Hibernate is not going to support these.
Also, some databases will generate DDL from a schema. Again this is database specific and not something you can get Hibernate to do.
However, are you aware that the property hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto can take the value "update"? This will create the schema if its not already there, or apply changes if any have been made. If there are no changes it will change nothing. This might be what you are looking for?
No, I didn't know about the update setting.
And a DDL may be what I'm thinking of. I'm not a DB guy, so I'm not sure what the correct terms are.