Excellent catch, jaikiran! I had several "version" fields in various tables, one of which (and only one) was defined as a varchar. Checking the generated hbm I found that this was being defined as a Hibernate version element, which it didn't need to be. Changing that one field to a name different than "version" cleared the problem. I've now changed all "version" fields to be prefixed with a table identifier to avoid this issue in the future. Many thanks. It sure is nice to start the new year with a completely unclear problem clarified. :-) I have one more minor issue that cropped up on deployment after fixing this problem. I get a number of messages like this: 10:14:41,326 ERROR [SchemaExport] Unsuccessful: create table crunch.tool (guid varchar(50) not null, state integer, displayName text, Application varchar(50), lastUpdate datetime, wrapperGuid varchar(50), helpGuid varchar(50), toolVersion text, interpreter varchar(50), addDate datetime, lastUse datetime, toolOwner varchar(50), fileGuid varchar(50), toolTypeGuid varchar(50), toolValidator varchar(50), primary key (guid)) | 10:14:41,326 ERROR [SchemaExport] Table 'tool' already exists I believe this is because my persistence.xml includes this line: <property name="hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto" value="create-drop"/> And because I've already loaded the db prior to deployment (as part of the build process in order to do the Hibernate reverse engineering). Removing this line from persistence.xml causes other problems. These messages are only informative as far as I can tell, but it would be nice to eliminate them to make a clean deployment. Do you know how I might be able to do this? View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4116462#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...