What are the possible values of the Hibernate hbm2ddl.auto configuration and what do they do

The configuration property is called hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto

In our development environment we set hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto=create-drop to drop and create a clean database each time we deploy, so that our database is in a known state.

In theory, you can set hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto=update to update your database with changes to your model, but I would not trust that on a production database. An earlier version of the documentation said that this was experimental, at least; I do not know the current status.

Therefore, for our production database, do not set hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto - the default is to make no database changes. Instead, we manually create an SQL DDL update script that applies changes from one version to the next.

4 years ago

hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto Automatically validates or exports schema DDL to the database when the SessionFactory is created. With create-drop, the database schema will be dropped when the SessionFactory is closed explicitly.

e.g. validate | update | create | create-drop

So the list of possible options are,

validate: validate the schema, makes no changes to the database.
update: update the schema.
create: creates the schema, destroying previous data.
create-drop: drop the schema when the SessionFactory is closed explicitly, typically when the application is stopped.
none: does nothing with the schema, makes no changes to the database

4 years ago

If you don't want to use Strings in your app and are looking for predefined constants have a look at org.hibernate.cfg.AvailableSettings class included in the Hibernate JAR, where you'll find a constant for all possible settings. In your case for example:

/
* Auto export/update schema using hbm2ddl tool. Valid values are <tt>update</tt>,
* <tt>create</tt>, <tt>create-drop</tt> and <tt>validate</tt>.
*/
String HBM2DDL_AUTO = "hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto";

4 years ago

First, the possible values for the hbm2ddl configuration property are the following ones:

none - No action is performed. The schema will not be generated.
create-only - The database schema will be generated.
drop - The database schema will be dropped.
create - The database schema will be dropped and created afterward.
create-drop - The database schema will be dropped and created afterward. Upon closing the SessionFactory, the database schema will be dropped.
validate - The database schema will be validated using the entity mappings.
update - The database schema will be updated by comparing the existing database schema with the entity mappings.
The hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto="update" is convenient but less flexible if you plan on adding functions or executing some custom scripts.

So, The most flexible approach is to use Flyway.

However, even if you use Flyway, you can still generate the initial migration script using hbm2ddl.

4 years ago