My company is evaluating using Hibernate for ORM between J2EE and Oracle DBs. One of our requirements is that we have to authenticate every user in the database. In other words, just having the app server log in under general username/identity is not enough. We have to use proxy authentication or the CLIENT_IDENTIFIER application-context parameter methods of authenticating. Is this possible when using Toplink for ORM?

It is possible for TopLink to do this.

But this is a Hibernate forum ;)

You can do this in Hibernate as well using the "user supplied connection" approach. Have a look at the SessionFactory.openSession() method which take a connection parameter. Check out http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/reference/html/session-configuration.html#session-configuration-s3 for more information.