We're currently migrating to hibernate.

The software we're developing already has a (JDBC-)feature, where a user
can browse through the database and take a look at the Metadata
(before anybody asks, we need this feature for debugging- and migration-processes only).
We're implementing our software in very different enviroments with databases of various manufactures.
Because hibernates understands several dialects, I was wondering if there's
a way to request the "real"-db-Metadata (which -I think- is different than
the mapped Metadata which you can request via the ClassMetadata-Object).
I know that I could probably implement this by giving the correct
SQL-Statement to hibernate (or JBDC :) ), but I would have to know the
correct SQL-Syntax (and sometimes DBMS-Strukture) of every database
we encounter.

So is there a way to make this stuff database-independent with hibernate ?

You could use session.connection().getMetaData() to get the JDBC DatabaseMetaData object. Is that what you want?

Yes and No :)

Our software already operates with the JDBC DatabaseMetaData object. We have the problem, that the Meta-Data contained in that object (most important: the structure -> catalogs etc) are different with every DBMS we encounter. For example, oracle has a different structure than mysql. I just thought that maybe there is a (hibernate-)way to represent that Meta-Data in a universal, db-independent object. The optimal way for us would be, if the user could be able to "see" the same structure with every database hibernate supports :).

(I'll give you a credit anyway ;) )

Aren't the methods in the JDBC API standard across databases? Or are you saying that the metadata returned from the methods is non-standard, and you want some useful abstraction of that?