After reading Hibernate: hbm2ddl.auto=update in production? some questions arose. First of all, the reason for I'm using Hibernate is to be database vendor independent (no need to write 10 versions of the "same" sql query, eg. tsql vs. sql).
My problem appears when it's time to create the database schemas (production environment). As far as I can see I have two alternatives.
The first alternative is widely discussed in the thread above. The second alternative is bad because that means I'm back to my first problem: "Don't want to create sql statements that are database vendor dependent". (This statement could be false if "all" (atlast the databases Hibernate support) are implementing the DDL (The subset of SQL used for defining and examining the structure of a database.) equal).
Do all changes in development/staging mode and transfer and execute scripts in production manually (or automatically, but don't let hibernate run them). The scripts may need some tunning since hbm2ddl update does not cover all cases.
In fact I never let hibernate run ddl against any database. I use hbm2ddl to generate text:
org.hibernate.tool.hbm2ddl.SchemaExport --config=hibernate.cfg.xml --text --format --delimiter=;
org.hibernate.tool.hbm2ddl.SchemaUpdate --config=hibernate.cfg.xml --text --format --delimiter=;