Given an Oracle table FOO mapped to object Foo, and a DATE NOT NULL column FOO.T_CREATE that is mapped to Foo.TCreate, how can I get Hibernate to initialize this column using SYSDATE?

I.e., if I create a new Foo object, and call session.insert() without setting the Foo.TCreate property, Hibernate's INSERT query should use SYSDATE as a default for the T_CREATE column. So I want the timestamp to be initialized from the database, not Java.

How can I do this?

For CreateTimestamp the easiest way to do it is to have a DEFAULT of SYSDATE in your table creation script. For the UpdateTimestamp, I am not sure how you would go about solving this problem. I tried looking though some docs and googled around and some other people have made the same request in the past as well. I took the easy way out in my applications and just set a java.sql.Timestamp object to the POJO before saving it but I can see why you wouldn't want to tackle it that way.