Hibernate's "Pure native scalar queries are not yet supported"
In JPA one can define JPQL queries as well as native queries. Each of those can return either an Entity or one or more scalar values. Queries can be created on demand at run-time from a String, or at start-up time from an annotation (or corresponding XML variant see Where to put named queries in JPA? ). Of all those combinations, curiously Hibernate has never supported named native queries returning a scalar result, including insert, update and delete queries which all don't return a result set, but merely the number of rows affected. It's a curious case, since Hibernate does support scalar returns in non-native named queries (thus a scalar return and named queries is not the problem), and it does support scalar returns in dynamically created native queries (thus scalar returns in native queries are not the problem either). An example of this specific combination: <named-native-query name="SomeName"> <query> INSERT INTO foo...