> - I've tried setting hibernate.jdbc.batch_size and hibernate.order_inserts and seen hibernate seem to be batching the inserts but saw no increase in performance.

Does not really matter for Firebird, since API does not have batch
support. That means that driver emulates batches by sending commands one
at a time.

What is your transaction setting? Do you manage transactions by yourself
or you work in auto-commit mode?

> - I changed to using one of the new id generators that pools and saw it getting 50 ids per select call but didn't see an increase in performance.

That is good - it reduces the number of database roundtrips.

> Are there settings in the driver or Firebird that I need to set so that the batching has more effect? We have very few indices.

Nope. The most important thing is the transaction management - commit is
quite expensive operation. I would even increase from 50 records per
batch to something between 1000 and 10000.

Roman