Thanks Felix. I was actually looking for EJB QL expression, not SQL function. Anyway, your reply helped me find following comment from Hibernate Reference document[1]: anonymous wrote : string concatenation ...||... or concat(...,...) (use concat() for portable EJB-QL queries) After I changed the query as follows, it worked with both Oracle and HSQL: | <fwk:entity-query name="contacts" | max-results="5"> | <fwk:ejbql>from Contact</fwk:ejbql> | <fwk:order>lastName</fwk:order> | <fwk:restrictions> | <value>lower(firstName) like lower( concat(#{exampleContact.firstName}, '%' ))</value> | <value>lower(lastName) like lower( concat(#{exampleContact.lastName}, '%') )</value> | </fwk:restrictions> | </fwk:entity-query> | Sample's code in CVS should be changed to make the application more portable, I believe. If Seam developers think the same way, I can create a Jira issue. Regards, Ali Sadik Kumlali [1] http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/entitymanager/reference/en/html/queryhq... View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4078063#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...