I needed to set the generate_statistics property for Hibernate, with use with the excellent Hibernate JConsole Plugin.

The issue is that I am using Spring and JPA, and I wanted to set this property in my Spring XML configuration file. Most of the Spring JPA examples just show you how to set the properties exposed by the HibernateJpaVendorAdapter, e.g.

<bean id="entityManagerFactory" class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean">
 <property name="persistenceUnitName" value="a.b.c.d" />
 <property name="jpaVendorAdapter">
 <bean class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.vendor.HibernateJpaVendorAdapter">
 <property name="showSql" value="false" />
 <property name="generateDdl" value="false" />
 <property name="databasePlatform" value="SQLServer2008Dialect" />
 </bean>
 </property>
</bean>

So how can we set other Hibernate session properties? It turns out that we can set the jpaPropertyMap property of the parent LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean also:

<bean id="entityManagerFactory" class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean">
 <property name="persistenceUnitName" value="a.b.c.d" />
 <property name="jpaVendorAdapter">
 <bean class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.vendor.HibernateJpaVendorAdapter">
 <property name="showSql" value="false" />
 <property name="generateDdl" value="false" />
 <property name="databasePlatform" value="SQLServer2008Dialect" />
 </bean>
 </property>
 <property name="jpaPropertyMap">
 <map>
 <entry key="hibernate.generate_statistics" value="true"/>
 </map>
 </property>
 </bean>
</bean>

Now we are free to set Hiberate session properties. I found this technique used on the Spring Forums, as part of other solutions, but wanted to emphasis the basic technique for others who were similarly stumped.