I'm running oracle 10 and hibernate.

I'm trying to determine if there is a hibernate query that I can run to execute "select sysdate from dual". I googled and searched the forums and found some posts dating back to 2007 that indicate that I must do this in a native query.

Is this still the case is there a fairly recent version of hibernate that includes retrieval of the sysdate in a Hibernate query?

I've tried a few non-native queries but these do not seem to work, for example:
"select current_timestamp from dual"
"select current_timestamp"
"select current_timestamp()"