I've been looking at Hibernate to use for our project. We're trying to use Oracle's XMLType to store/retrieve XML content. I was wondering if there's a way to do this within Hibernate. I'm looking at implementing an extension with UserType but not sure what SQL types to use since this the column type is specific to oracle (although I believe they are using CLOB in some way but not too sure). Any help would be appreciated.

Figure out how to access your data with JDBC first, then it will be easy to write a custom UserType for it.

Actually this is more involved that it sounds. You need a JDBC Connection to be able to create an XMLType object - I've just played with this for some time with a JDO implementation - the route to handle it was using customised classes, which it doesn't seem Hibernate supports....

I assume then that the only way to handle this is to get a plain ordinary JDBC connection through the data source and treat is as part of the JTA transaction with an EJB