How to make Spring load a JDBC Driver BEFORE initializing Hibernate's SessionFactory?

I'm developing a Spring(2.5.6)+Hibernate(3.2.6) web application to connect to a custom database. For that I have custom JDBC Driver and Hibernate Dialect. I know for sure that these custom classes work (hard coded stuff on my unit tests).

The problem, I guess, is with the order on which things get loaded by Spring. Basically:

1. Custom Database initializes
2. Spring load beans from web.xml
3. Spring loads ServletBeans(applicationContext.xml)
4. Hibernate kicks in: shows version and all the properties correctly loaded.
5. Hibernate's HbmBinder runs (maps all my classes)
6. LocalSessionFactoryBean - Building new Hibernate SessionFactory
7. DriverManagerConnectionProvider - using driver: MyCustomJDBCDriver at CustomDBURL
8. I get a SQLException: No suitable driver found for CustomDBURL
9. Hibernate loads the Custom Dialect
10. My CustomJDBCDriver finally gets registered with DriverManager (log messages)
11. SettingsFactory runs
12. SchemaExport runs (hbm2ddl)
13. I get a SQLException: No suitable driver found for CustomDBURL (again?!)
14. Application get successfully deployed but there are no tables on my custom Database.

Things that I tried so far:

• Different techniques for passing hibernate properties: embedded in the 'sessionFactory' bean, loaded from a hibernate.properties file. Nothing worked but I didn't try with hibernate.cfg.xml file neither with a dataSource bean yet.
• MyCustomJDBCDriver has a static initializer block th开发者_如何学运维at registers it self with the DriverManager.
• Tried different combinations of lazy initializing (lazy-init="true") of the Spring beans but nothing worked.

My custom JDBC driver should be the first thing to be loaded - not sure if by Spring but...!

Can anyone give me a solution for this or maybe a hint for what else I could try? I can provide more details (huge stack traces for instance) if that helps.

Thanks in advance.

If Hibernate is responsible for getting database connections, then the hibernate properties needs to include the hibernate.connection.driver_class property.

In your case:

hibernate.connection.driver_class = CustomJDBCDriver