Question

I am used to Django South http://south.aeracode.org/, which allows schema and data migrations for Django projects. Does there exist a similar tool for Hibernate projects ?

Answer 1

Hibernate provides its own (limited) tools for schema migration.
There are several caveats attached to it, including a warning “not to use it for production instances”, although I have not personally experienced any issues using it against a prod system.

I wouldn’t advise it for data migration, or large scale relational mapping changes, but for simple changes it is generally adequate (at the very least, it can be run to generate the required DDL statements which can later be run manually).