For some of the Inversoft products I’ve been adding new tables for new features into our standard schema. The tricky part with updating the database is also giving customers all the update scripts that they need to run and instructions on how to run them correctly.

I figured I’d see what happened if I added all the JPA Entity classes to the persistence.xml file and didn’t update the database. Since none of the existing JPA Entity classes was changed, the application appears to work fine without the tables in the database.

This is good news for me as it allows me to ship new versions of the application without any fear of breaking customers who don’t update their database. This is true only if that customer doesn’t use any of the new features that access the new tables.