Setting hibernate logging to WARN does help but there is still a signficant performance difference. Here are the elapsed times with 20 consecutive selects each returning 5000 different rows (averaged over 3 runs excluding the 1st run). Hibernate logging set to WARN. createQuery(hsql): 11088ms createNativeQuery(sql): 5573ms createNativeQuery(sql,class): 7417ms JDBC: 5052ms So createQuery is still more than twice as slow as direct JDBC, even with Hibernate logging disabled. createNativeQuery(sql) is close to the JDBC time, but this excludes the time to generate the POJOs from the list of Objects returned. Interestingly, createNativeQuery(sql,class) is considerable faster than createQuery even though the underlying query is essentially the same. So perhaps the best approach is to go with createNativeQuery(sql,class) and then tune as required by rewriting as JDBC calls. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3988510#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...