Why shouldn't you rely on Hibernate's `ddl-auto` (e.g., `update` or `create`) to manage your production database schema?

Database Migrations & Connection Pooling

`ddl-auto` derives the schema automatically from your entity mappings, which is convenient for local development but dangerous in production: it offers no history of what changed and when, no way to review a change before it's applied, no rollback mechanism, and Hibernate's schema inference can make destructive or unexpected changes (like dropping a column it no longer sees mapped) that a hand-reviewed migration script would have caught. Production schema changes should go through a dedicated, version-controlled migration tool instead.