I seemed to have tracked down a solution to this error. I did some testing and it seems like the error only occurred on the 2nd nand subsequent runs, if I restart the application, the first time the error would not show up. Then the second time...bang...NPE. Searching the Oracle and Hibernate forums, I found that there may have been a bug in the version of the ojdbc14.jar I was using (early 9.2.0.1.0 version). I replaced the driver with the latest and greatest, but no solution then I found the post below that suggested that I set the hibernate property hibernate.jdbc.batch_size to 0. Seems to be working everytime I hit it now. http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=190963 Thanks again. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4007006#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...