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Could you please share your experience with NHibernate schema generation? How much scalable it is in terms of complexity and size of the data model? Does it have any major performance implication compared to hand crafted data model?
I’ve found it immensely useful for development, when you can use it with a bit of code to rebuild and repopulate test databases at will. Michael’s point about migrations matches our experience – once you’ve made the initial release you’ll need to decide on another method for altering production databases.
FWIW, we’ve used NH schema generation with about 30 models of the usual kinds (including a table per subclass arrangement), and the definitions that it generates are correct, so there’s no obvious limit to the size of the schema that it could handle.
I now tend to think that an automatically generated schema is almost always a better starting point than a hand-crafted one, because the software will give you something that is totally consistent and exactly what you specified. The kinds of optimizations that a skilled DBA can do aren’t likely to be necessary or useful until after you have a large, specific workload to tune for.