Firstly, a short announcement of a new, open-source JDBC Connection pool, BoneCP, (http://jolbox.com) that's faster than C3P0/DBCP (at least according to my benchmarks -- see the site). This is my first public release so though it's fairly well tested already (100% unit test coverage), I still consider it as being beta software so use with care!

Now for the question: Is there scope to get the datasource connection provider for hibernate directly in Hibernate's source code base or is it best to make it live standalone for separate download? What's the normal Hibernate policy re this?

Also apologies if this is not the right forum for this message, someone will surely guide me to the correct one if it isn't :-)

you should raise it on hibernate-dev mailing list ?