I'm some years late to the party here but I hit the same exception while trying to get Hibernate 3.5.1 working with HSQLDB and a desktop JavaFX program. I got it to work with the help of this thread and a lot of trial and error. It seems you get this error for a whole variety of problems:
No Persistence provider for EntityManager named mick
I tried building the hibernate tutorial examples but because I was using Java 10 I wasn't able to get them to build and run easily. I gave up on that, not really wanting to waste time fixing its problems. Setting up a module-info.java file (Jigsaw) is another hairball many people haven't discovered yet.
Somewhat confusing is that these (below) were the only two files I needed in my build.gradle file. The Hibernate documentation isn't clear about exactly which Jars you need to include. Entity-manager was causing confusion and is no longer required in the latest Hibernate version, and neither is javax.persistence-api. Note, I'm using Java 10 here so I had to include the jaxb-api, to get around some xml-bind errors, as well as add an entry for the java persistence module in my module-info.java file.
Build.gradle
// https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.hibernate/hibernate-core
compile('org.hibernate:hibernate-core:5.3.1.Final')
// https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/javax.xml.bind/jaxb-api
compile group: 'javax.xml.bind', name: 'jaxb-api', version: '2.3.0'
Module-info.java
// Used for HsqlDB - add the hibernate-core jar to build.gradle too
requires java.persistence;
With hibernate 5.3.1 you don't need to specify the provider, below, in your persistence.xml file. If one is not provided the Hibernate provider is chosen by default.
<provider>org.hibernate.jpa.HibernatePersistenceProvider</provider>
The persistence.xml file should be located in the correct directory so:
src/main/resources/META-INF/persistence.xml
Stepping through the hibernate source code in the Intellij debugger, where it checks for a dialect, also threw the exact same exception, because of a missing dialect property in the persistence.xml file. I added this (add the correct one for your DB type):
<property name="hibernate.dialect" value="org.hibernate.dialect.HSQLDialect"/>
I still got the same exception after this, so stepping through the debugger again in Intellij revealed the test entity I was trying to persist (simple parent-child example) had missing annotations for the OneToMany, ManyToOne relationships. I fixed this and the exception went away and my entities were persisted ok.
Here's my full final persistence.xml:
<persistence xmlns="http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/persistence"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/persistence
http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/persistence/persistence_2_1.xsd"
version="2.1">
<persistence-unit name="mick" transaction-type="RESOURCE_LOCAL">
<description>
Persistence unit for the JPA tutorial of the Hibernate Getting Started Guide
</description>
<!-- Provided in latest release of hibernate
<provider>org.hibernate.jpa.HibernatePersistenceProvider</provider>
-->
<class>com.micks.scenebuilderdemo.database.Parent</class>
<class>com.micks.scenebuilderdemo.database.Child</class>
<properties>
<property name="javax.persistence.jdbc.driver" value="org.hsqldb.jdbc.JDBCDriver"/>
<property name="javax.persistence.jdbc.url"
value="jdbc:hsqldb:file:./database/database;DB_CLOSE_DELAY=-1;MVCC=TRUE"/>
<property name="javax.persistence.jdbc.user" value="sa"/>
<property name="javax.persistence.jdbc.password" value=""/>
<property name="hibernate.show_sql" value="true"/>
<property name="hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto" value="create"/>
<property name="hibernate.dialect" value="org.hibernate.dialect.HSQLDialect"/>
</properties>
</persistence-unit>
</persistence>
I probably wasted about half a day on this gem. My advice would be to start very simple - a single test entity with one or two fields, as it seems like this exception can have many causes.
