well you hit 2 distinct things: 1- DDL, mainly used by Schema Export --> see my previous comment. SchemaExport uses hibernate metadatas to generate a schema creation script. (FYI metadatas is the place where you say my class Person is mapped to the PERSON table or, in your case, the PERSON table is mapped to the entity name "Person" if you don't have a real class) 2- DML. With Hibernate, you use HQL (or JPA QL), it's OO based on class and property names (associations, collections, basic properties). 2-a, if you use dynamic models, you'll have to define aliases (entity-name) instead of using class and property names). Then, in your java code, when querying, you'll use theses aliases. The HQL query will be translated in SQL 2-b if you don't like the generated SQL, if you want to tune it, you'll have to use the SQL query feature which is very close to pure JDBC... 3- about caching, you can disable all the caches. I must admit that this is a very specific usage of hibernate, I'm pinging the core Hibernate guys to get their feelings. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4117911#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...