Dbmigration is a lightweight framework than can take care of creating and updating a db schema.

This frameworks simply allow to configure with Spring a list of scrips to be executed at the application startup before setting up your persistence framework. This is similar to the auto ddl generation of hibernate, but has some advantages:

• alter scripts are more under control (hibernate ddl generation is not intended for production usage, dbmigration is)
• alter can be a lot more complex (for example on column addition/removal you can configure a script that can also take care of data migration)
• scripts can operate on any db object, not only tables.

There are different reasons for using this frameworks:

• During development nobody should manually take care of applying db scripts or fix its own db due to changes introduced by other developers.
• All the script used in development will be used as is also in production, so they are usually deeply tested.
• You will never forgive to apply a db script next time you will have to release a new version of your application in production

A few links that talk about the reason for an update framework (not related to openutils-dbmigration):

http://blogs.opensymphony.com/plightbo/2006/08/the_beauty_of_an_upgrade_frame.html

http://www.infoq.com/news/upgrade-frameworks

http://jroller.com/page/mrdon?entry=transparent_sql_schema_migration_with

http://www.talios.com/simple_database_migration_processing.htm