It is common to duplicate a database model in multiple schemas. You may have one schema for development and another for production, or different database users may access different schemas. OpenJPA facilitates these patterns with the openjpa.jdbc.Schema configuration property. This property establishes a default schema for any unqualified table names, allowing you to leave schema names out of your mapping definitions.

The Schema property also establishes the default schema for new tables created through OpenJPA tools, such as the mapping tool covered in Section 1, “ Forward Mapping ”.