@Gail Badner, no, I don't think it is HHH-11455 Closed for the following reasons:

• HHH-11455 Closed refers to database vendors that don't support a schema. We are using Microsoft SQL Server 2014 which obviously does utilise schema.
• I encountered the issue porting our application from JBoss 6.4.5, which integrates Hibernate 4.3, where it previously worked very well.
• The error trace I received was exactly as given in the description here on HHH-10978 Closed , and is how I found this issue and the related StackOverflow thread (https://stackoverflow.com/q/35651997):

  javax.persistence.PersistenceException: Unable to build Hibernate SessionFactory
  Caused by: org.hibernate.exception.SQLGrammarException: Error accessing table metadata
  Caused by: com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.SQLServerException: An object or column name is missing or empty.
  

• I could work around the issue by modifying our code so that every instance of a @Table annotation that specified schema also included catalog; or by filling in the default schema and catalog in the persistence.xml configuration file. Neither is a suitable solution for us, however, as we don't want the database name embedded in our code (we have our databases named differently across development/test/production/etc environments). The ultimate fix was to install an updated version of Hibernate (at the time, 5.2.7) into our JBoss 7 platform.