From the community documentation:
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 at the end of the session.
Xml based metalanguage for a database schema definition. The following artifacts could be generated from this definition: DDL scripts for various database servers, HTML - documentation, ERD.
Naturally I want to have a transactional DBMS, so I always pick InnoDB as the MySQL storage engine. I also want UTF-8 support because the content I store is entered by users from all over the world. Hence not all of the tips and tricks shown here might be relevant for you, in fact, if you are happy with your system in production, do not change anything. Also note that many of these customizations are only relevant if you let Hibernate generate your MySQL DDL and schema for you.
The Mogwai ERDesigner is a entity relation modeling tool such as ERWin and co. The only difference is that it is Open Source and does not cost anything. It was designed to make database modeling as easy as it can be and to support the developer in the whole development process, from database design to schema and code generation. This tool was also designed to support a flexible plug in architecture, to extend the system simply by installing a new plug in. This way, everybody can implement new features and tools to make ERDesigner fit the requirements.
ERDesigner NG
* is based on Java and can be run on Windows and Unix systems
* has a powerfull WYSIWYG for physical database design
* handles tables, relations, indexes and comments
* supports subject areas
* supports MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQLServer and Postgres
* creates the SQL DDL statements for schema creation
* has an integrated schema version control system
* can generate schema migration scripts for every change
* stores the database definition as XML files for further processing
* can export the database schema as GIF, BMP, JPEG or SVG files
* has an integrated reverse engineering module for existing schemas
* it is based on GPL license
* support is available by authors and newsgroups
XML to DDL is a set of python programs to convert an XML representation of a schema into a database and vice versa. It can also examine the differences between two databases and emit the ALTER DDL statements required to bring the database up-to-date. This