That was pretty easy, wasn't it? You'll be happy to learn that creating database tables is a very similar process. As with code generation, you've already done most of the work in coming up with the mapping document. All that's left is to set up and run the schema generation tool.

How do I do that?

The first step is something we alluded to in Chapter 1. We need to tell Hibernate the database we're going to be using, so it knows the specific "dialect" of SQL to use. SQL is a standard, yes, but every database goes beyond it in certain directions and has a specific set of features and limitations that affect real-life applications. To cope with this reality, Hibernate provides a set of classes that encapsulate the unique features of common database environments, in the package net.sf.hibernate.dialect. You just need to tell it which one you want to use. (And if you want to work with a database that isn't yet supported "out of the box," you can implement your own dialect.)

In our case, we're working with HSQLDB, so we want to use HSQLDialect. The easiest way to configure Hibernate is to create a properties file named hibernate.properties and put it at the root level somewhere in the class path. Create this file at the top level of your src directory, and put the lines shown in Example 2-4 into it.

NOTE You can use an XML format for the configuration information as well, but for the simple needs we have here, it doesn't buy you anything.

In addition to establishing the SQL dialect we are using, this tells Hibernate how to establish a connection to the database using the JDBC driver that ships as part of the HSQLDB database JAR archive, and that the data should live in the data directory we've created—in the database named music. The username and empty password (indeed, all these values) should be familiar from the experiment we ran at the end of Chapter 1.

TIP: Notice that we're using a relative path to specify the database filename. This works fine in our examples — we're using ant to control the working directory. If you copy this for use in a web application or other environment, though, you'll likely need to be more explicit about the location of the file.

You can put the properties file in other places, and give it other names, or use entirely different ways of getting the properties into Hibernate, but this is the default place it will look, so it's the path of least resistance (or, I guess, least runtime configuration).