This article proposes a few workarounds that you might be able to apply or not. Today I encountered a case that was troubling me for a while.

I’m using Hibernate 3.2.5.ga to map a class to some legacy table containing a DATE column holding date + time information. The property mapping looks as simple as <property name="timestamp" column= "MESSAGE_TIMESTAMP"/ >.

I have configured Hibernate with hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto=validate so my mapping files are checked against database metadata. As a result Hibernate would throw an exception at me telling that it can’t match the column type with the POJO property type.

org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: Error creating bean with name 'sessionFactory' defined in ServletContext resource [/WEB-INF/context-web.xml]: Invocation of init method failed; nested exception is org.hibernate.HibernateException: Wrong column type: COMM_MSGDT, expected: timestamp
Caused by: org.hibernate.HibernateException: Wrong column type: COMM_MSGDT, expected: timestamp
	at org.hibernate.mapping.Table.validateColumns(Table.java:261)
...

If you don’t need time information you can get around this execption by tweaking the type information for the property mapping (<property name="timestamp" column="MESSAGE_TIMESTAMP" type="date"/>) otherwise if time is required then you are in trouble!

The Oracle article above is suggesting to set a system property (as a JVM start parameter) which is kind of difficult to handle during deployment. So I was investigating the other option which is to set the connection property (oracle.jdbc.V8Compatible=true) for the Oracle JDBC driver, this option would allow a deployment configuration that is working “out-of-the-box”. Reading the Tomcat documentation on how to configure a JNDI DataSource led me to the DBCP documentation that is explaining this thoroughly.

I’m using a Tomcat managed DataSource. So I’m having a META-INF/context.xml file to set up the DataSource. To fix the type problem just add the property connectionProperties.