Hibernate Tools and the ever changing database

Question

I am currently using Hibernate Tools 3.1; I customized naming convention and DAO templates. The database (SQL Server 2005) in early development phase and I'm in charge of rebuilding the mappings, entities, DAOs, configuration, whatever. Each time I have to reverse-engineer the tables and so I lose every customization I made on the mappings (*.hbm.xml files) like adjusting the identity columns, picking the fields used in equals and toString. I was considering to write the diff XML in a file and the "merge" that onto the generated mapping (see my related question) but I was wondering... is there any best practice/tool for dealing with these annoying, unavoidable, critical tasks?

Answer 1

I'd strongly recommend against continual reverse engineering. Reverse engineering is a great one time thing, but changes need to be managed as changes to both the hbm and the database.

We use migrations to manage db changes, and we include the associated changes in the hbm. If Hibernate has it (I believe it does) you may want to look into annotations instead of an hbm, they can be quite a bit easier to maintain.