Since this gets asked frequently, I thought I might as well post it here. Microsoft has released the long-awaited new version of their own JDBC driver for SQLServer. You can find it at http://msdn.microsoft.com/data/jdbc/. Supposedly it's a huge improvement over the old one. No word yet if it works better with Hibernate than its predecessor. [ January 20, 2006: Message edited by: Ulf Dittmer ]