I hope this is OK to post on this forum. If there is a better place to post this, please let me know.

I'm looking for a cheaper way to pay someone to help me with occasional Hiberate issues than the $30k/year minimum contract through JBoss support -- someone(s) who I can get in touch with for specific Hibernate help on an infrequent but ongoing basis. In general, when I get stuck I post here on the forums, but since my website is a professional company I have actual budget to actually pay someone for some help when I really need it. I would imagine this would be only an hour or a few hours every few months, something around $100/hour (or maybe a project based fee like $50 or $100 to answer a specific question or help with an error here or there, since I think most of my questions could be answered in 10 minutes by someone who knows this stuff).

Yes, I know Hibernate offers professional services through JBoss and I would love to support that and the OS business model. The minimum package quoted to me by sales reps (when I checked about a year ago) was about $30k/year which is WAY beyond the scale of help I need (maybe a total of 5 hours per year). I would love to be able to purchase a smaller hourly scale package of support from JBoss and support the OS business model. (If I'm wrong here, please let me know.)

As a side note, I also tried to take an "Advanced Hibernate" class last year in San Francisco, but left and got my money back after half a day when the class turned out to really be an intro class masked in an Advanced title. (I guess when the Intro class went away, the Advanced class merged down.) Bringing back true Advanced hibernate classes would be much appreciated.

Thanks! If interested email dslevine.at.gmail.com

PS: What I am currently trying to figure out is how to use aggregate queries and arbitrary SQL clauses as order by causes using the Criteria API when that data is not being included in the select clause. Maybe using Projection, but that ends up in the Select clause (i think?) so maybe then using a Subselect or... maybe there's an easy way i just dont know about!