Hi, we're looking into using Hibernate in an upcoming project and
I'm trying to get the latest version up and running with Firebird
and Jaybird, choosing the 'FirebirdDialect' for Hibernate.

When you first install Hibernate, they suggest you do 'ant eg' to
run a demo program, then 'ant junitreport' to run their unit tests.
So far I can't get either to work fully.

The first thing I found out was that I had to configure firebird to
expose some UDF's like 'lower' that Hibernate was trying to call.

There was also a note on the Hibernate site about setting
hibernate.statement_cache.size to 0.

The next thing I found out was that I had to restart the service to
pick up some of those changes :-)

That got me a lot closer to running the 'eg' example, but now I'm
running into some issues with 'alter table' and changing foreign key
constraints. I think I may be able to get past that by putting the
database into single user mode, which I'm about to try.

There are still quite a few failures in the junit tests, but I
haven't even begun to look into those.

It seems to me that the 'eg' example and the junit tests try to
exercise some non-core features that may fail on some databases. It
seems like they should have a simpler first tier of example and
testcases that verify basic functionality with your database so you
can just get your initial "warm fuzzy" and then move on.

I'm trying to work my way through the "Hibernate in Action" book to
get an overall understanding, and I'm still trying to get the
example and testcases working as I have time. Eventually I may have
to punt and just write some simple examples of my own to see what I
can get to work.

If anyone else is heading down this path, please drop me a line and
maybe between us we can work out how to get these tools to play
nicely and post the results somewhere to make it easier on those
that come after us.

Thanks,
-Jeff