I ran into some problems with oracle and i after a painfull day i found a way to deal with them. So here they are.
In (generated by enterprise architect) oracle sql script we had types like smallint bigint and integer which were all entered in db as decimal without a warning!. Normally reveng.xml was useless because those were never found by tools so the sollution was to use decimal.
Similar problem occurs when a type appears in the script which oracle doesn't recognize. It just sets it as other which is mapped to java.lang.Object by tools.
As far as case insensitivity is concerned it can be taken care of by putting table and column names in double quotes. But this comes with a price. Hibernate is unable to properly map tables if they were named like i mentioned above. It reports that the table or view cannot be found.
Does anybody have an idea how it can be resolved?

i never seen oracle behave like this - it normally is pretty strict on what types you give it...guess it wasnt in your case (glad to hear it wasnt the tools that were the problem ;)

I dont have issues with oracle case sensitivity (except when reverse engineering) - your issus about case sounds like its happening at runtime with hibernate ? Oracle is normally ok with "select blah" instead of "select BLAH" AFAIK

Oracle haven't types : smallint,bigint and integer.There is type NUMBER for all numeric types and in last version (10g rel 2) binary_float and binary_double

for max : 'select blah' and 'select BLAH' is same, but you can have query 'select "bLaH" ' and it search for identifier 'bLaH' in database - you can create table with :

create table "AbC" ....

and query

select * from abc
or
select * from AbC

doesn't work, but

select * from "AbC"

work

@max
The error happens when hibernate is started and begins to validate hbm.xml's. For example it looks for AgentDeployedInAction but in the db it's AGENTDEPLOYEDINACTION. Why then does JDBC driver report "table or view does not exist" if oracle is CI?
@snpesnpe
As for the types i know there are no smallint bigint. But it could have at least fired off a warning. At lest that's what I expect from a DBMS that's expensive as a good kidney :)

@max when do you expect hib tools will be able to map to primitive types?

it already can - you just need to tell it in reveng.xml