Just from my database experience I would say that it is not possible. Any sane JPA-Provider will execute the query using a PreparedStatement and any sane JDBC driver will excute a prepared statement using bind variables. AFAIK bind variables can only represent SQL literals like strings, numbers and dates but they can not be replaced by a database object like a column. So your named query would result in something | SELECT * FROM TBL_HOT_CONTENT ORDER BY 'viewsWeekly desc' | and this will not work for obvious reasons. Please correct me if I am wrong. Regards Felix View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4008590#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...