DatabaseMetadata class call (in the main constructor) a deprecated method : dialect.buildSQLExceptionConverter();
In hibernate 4.3.5, this return null... so SQLException convertion are not working...

=> the method "dialect.buildSQLExceptionConverterDelegate()" should be use instead (see documentation on Dialect.buildSQLExceptionConverter())

Full stack trace :
java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.hibernate.engine.jdbc.spi.SqlExceptionHelper.convert(SqlExceptionHelper.java:126)
at org.hibernate.engine.jdbc.spi.SqlExceptionHelper.convert(SqlExceptionHelper.java:112)
at org.hibernate.tool.hbm2ddl.DatabaseMetadata.getTableMetadata(DatabaseMetadata.java:156)
(...)

To get this exception, i used a Oracle database connection, I called :
getTableMetadata("MY_VIEW", schema, catalog, isQuoted);