Currently using hibernate 3.0 with JBoss.

I am trying to execute the following query to retrieve the first letter of values in the brand column of an oracle table called itc_brand

itcBrandAlphaList = hs.createSQLQuery("select distinct substr(ib.brand,1,1) as brandLetter from itcbrand ib").list();

There does not need to be a mapping for this , as I only want to retrieve the first letter of the brand column. There error I get when running the application is

java.sql.SQLException: ORA-00942: table or view does not exist

Do I need to create a mapping. If so how do I specify the column name, as it is not a column in the table, but a derived column value.

The table does exist in an oracle database.

You can not just pass in an SQL query to the createSQLQuery method. It has a particular syntax that it is looking for.

for example if you SQL is:

SELECT u.id as id FROM users u

the string passed to the createSQL query would look like:

String sqlquery = "select u.is as {uzer.id} from users u";

session.createSQLQuery(sqlquery, "uzer", User.class).list();

the syntax for createSQLQuery is createSQLQuery(String string, String alias, Class classYouAreAliasing)