Can you post the contents of the persistence.xml? By any chance, is "principalrole" a view? The Hibernate JIRA has some bugs reported (with similar exceptions) about similar problems when you have views involved and have hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto enabled. The other thing that you can check is the datasource file. Does it point to the correct database? While posting the logs or code or xml content, remember to wrap it in a code block using the Code button in the message editor window and please hit the Preview button to make sure your post is correctly formatted View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4144706#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...