We are looking for more ideas (using Hibernate 3 and Oracle) to point the same Hibernate persistent class at different copies of the same table at runtime depending on a context set within the application (new tables/contexts are dynamically configured for the application). We are considering one alternative of dynamically loading new configuration/session factories (with selected class definitions and context-specific table names in the configuration) on a per context basis. We also know that we can generate and use SQL queries to read access or use a custom persister. Modifying Hibernate is an alternative that we don't want to pursue.

Thanks
R

Maybe try using your own persister class - with combination of your own naming startegy implementation.
Should do a heavy chack on this one though. :-(

have you tried to use different entity-names ?
<class entity-name="X1" class="X">
....

and X2, X3 etc....

that allows you to map the same class to multiple tables.

But if you just want to have different configurations/sessionfactories then some search and replace in the mapping files or some programmatic changes into a configuration should work fine.