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:
There are different reasons for using this frameworks:
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
Check it at http://www.mvnrepository.com/artifact/net.sourceforge.openutils/openutils-dbmigration