The issue appears to be in the mutli line parsing for the load script under HSQLDB. If the file is reformatted to use single line inserts only, it appears to be functioning properly. Once multi lines are inserted it fails in the database creation from persistence.xml. As I believe there may have been changes in this area under https://hibernate.atlassian.net/browse/HHH-14033 that were backported into 5.4.20, it might be that has caused a regression.