How can I use hibernate with MS Access?

Actual solution here!

After spending 1 day trying out different solutions ODBC, HXTT, etc. I found this beauty :) http://ucanaccess.sourceforge.net/site.html.

It couldn't be any simpler: just add the jars from the site to your project libs and.

META-INF/persistence.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><persistence>    <persistence-unit name="traderMandate">        <provider>org.hibernate.ejb.HibernatePersistence</provider>        <properties>            <property name="hibernate.dialect" value="org.hibernate.dialect.SQLServerDialect" />            <property name="hibernate.connection.url" value="jdbc:ucanaccess://C:/MY.accdb;" />            <property name="hibernate.connection.driver_class" value="net.ucanaccess.jdbc.UcanaccessDriver"/>            <property name="hibernate.archive.autodetection" value="class" />        </properties>    </persistence-unit></persistence>          

Spring config:

<bean id="entityManagerFactory" class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean">    <property name="persistenceUnitName" value="traderMandate"/></bean><tx:annotation-driven/><bean id="transactionManager" class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.JpaTransactionManager">    <property name="entityManagerFactory" ref="entityManagerFactory"/></bean>

And you're good to go. ;)

For MS Access, you'll need the dialect from HXTT. You'll need to use the hibernate support package provided by HXTT. There is also a sample project that you can check for a fully working example.

Below, a sample minimal configuration:

# Hxtt Access dialect samplehibernate.dialect=com.hxtt.support.hibernate.HxttAccessDialecthibernate.connection.driver_class=com.hxtt.sql.access.AccessDriverhibernate.connection.url=jdbc:access:///c:/yourAccessDirectory

PS: If MS Access is not a written in stone requirement, maybe you should consider using something else like... well, anything.

You can use an other strategy and a free strategy to resolve this problem (HXTT is not free) :

http://www.programmingforfuture.com/2011/06/how-to-use-ms-access-with-hibernate.html

Personaly I got an exception when I try to reverse engineering the ms database (org.hibernate.exception.GenericJDBCException: Error while reading primary key meta data), yet it works for many people.