> but the missing tables with no exception in sight might prove harder
That is the most interesting use case :).
> Do you know any circumstances under which the tables would fail to appear for a successful EAR deployment,
Are you getting something like "expected DDL file
<yourapp>createDDL.jdbc is not available" in server.log? Any other
exception/ WARNING message in server.log?
Is your database reachable when you are deploying?
> bearing in mind that when I use Hibernate as the provider (i.e. only changing the<provider> tag in the persistence.xml), I do get tables?
EclipseLink is the default JPA provider for GlassFish. We have tighter
integration with it for better user experience at redeploy and hence its
the GlassFish code that executes the DDL generated by EclipseLink. Where
as for Hibernate, we let it go to database directly. Hope that clarifies
the difference.