I have the same problem in a stand alone JVM without any Spring libs in classpath. I am running 5.0.0B2 against with Mysql 5.0.45 / 5.5.41
2015-05-20 11:05:04,161 [ERROR] PimDBStore (main) - on building session factory
java.lang.ClassCastException: java.util.Collections$EmptyIterator cannot be cast to java.lang.Iterable
at org.hibernate.tool.schema.extract.internal.SequenceInformationExtractorNoOpImpl.extractMetadata(SequenceInformationExtractorNoOpImpl.java:45)
at org.hibernate.tool.schema.extract.internal.legacy.DatabaseInformationImpl.initializeSequences(DatabaseInformationImpl.java:89)
at org.hibernate.tool.schema.extract.internal.legacy.DatabaseInformationImpl.<init>(DatabaseInformationImpl.java:85)
at org.hibernate.tool.hbm2ddl.SchemaUpdate.execute(SchemaUpdate.java:136)
at org.hibernate.tool.hbm2ddl.SchemaUpdate.execute(SchemaUpdate.java:114)
at org.hibernate.internal.SessionFactoryImpl.<init>(SessionFactoryImpl.java:461)
at org.hibernate.boot.internal.SessionFactoryBuilderImpl.build(SessionFactoryBuilderImpl.java:462)
at org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration.buildSessionFactory(Configuration.java:747)
at my.app.pim.mysql.PimDBStore.init(PimDBStore.java:67)
at my.app.pim.exportWatcher.PimExportWatcher.<init>(PimExportWatcher.java:61)
at my.app.pim.exportWatcher.PimExportWatcher.main(PimExportWatcher.java:73)
2015-05-20 11:05:04,164 [ERROR] PimDBStore (main) - The session factory is not initialised!