I have the applicationContext.xml on the classpath with the sessionFactory bean. I'm using annotations with Spring and Hibernate. Now when I test the connection I get a cryptic error: org.hibernate.hql.ast.QuerySyntaxException: unexpected token: Address near line 1, column 27 [select address as address Address as address] The stack trace is absolutely no help, there is no "Caused By: " entry. Why is this statement even being executed? My Query text is blank. Even when I comment out all the mappings in my hibernate configuration file it tries to do this. Thanks in advance I'm really stumped on this one.