I think somewhere along the line Hibernate changed how the values for hbm2ddl.auto" are handled. I find myself recently initially setting it to "create" and after running the first time changing it to "update", specifically for the reason you mentioned. I suspect it has something to do with the JPA-related changes for EJB3. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4155710#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...