Hibernate version:
2.1.7

Full stack trace of any exception that occurs:
None

Name and version of the database you are using:
MySQL 4.1.7, JDBC Connector 3.0.16-ga

We've got an issue with Hibernate and MySQL 4.1.7 whereby if you hand-edit a field in the database the change is not immediately reflected by Hibernate. The old value is returned, however, the (rather bad) MySQL GUI we are using does reflect the change.. A restart of the web server is required. This is the case under both Windows and Linux. This behaviour is not observed under SQL Server.

Any suggestions?

I think this problem was caused by the Hibernate connection pooling implementation. I notice in the SchemaExport output that it is not intended for production use. I configured c3p0 and this seemed to fix the problem.