My apologies in advance if this is not the right forum.

Our persistence layer is implemented using Hibernate; both MSSQL and Orace are supported. We often use P6Spy for debugging. Personally I find this to be a great combination. But to switch from one database to another two property files have to be modified: spy for driver name and hibernate for connection parameters.

For my personal purposes I have modified hibernate and P6Spy as follows:
1. In Hibernate (cfg.Configuration.addProperites actually) if the name of the property being set starts with "env." then strip the part set the property using System.setProperty.
2. In P6Spy allow system properties that start with "p6spy." to overide the properties specified in spy.properties.
Then I switch between different values of "env.p6spy.realdriver" and "hibernate.connection.driver_class" in hibernate.cfg.xml.

Is this a bad idea? Is there a better alternative? Thanks in advance for your comments.

It's good idea and solution, but I think we shouldn't make it default Hibernate behavior. The configuration process is already too complex for some people.

Thanks for the quick response, Christian. I agree that the configuration process is rather complex, but I am keen to have this or some similar functionality available.

Would you consider some other similar scheme, say using a different tag systemProperty to set system property instead of switching on the name of the property? Unless some such functionality is available I have to patch every time I update my local copy of hibernate.cfg.xml and unpatch (if there is such a thing :) before committing it.

Thanks in advance.