There seem to be a few problems related to column aliases. There's the following derby bug report that describes the problem I've just run into. Though every other database lets you use column aliases in the where clause derby doesn't. The derby developers say that's fine cause that's what the standard says. Unfortunately that doesn't help anyone who wants to use hibernate, you can't use {task.id} = :id for instance, you have to say TASKS.TASK_ID = :id instead so sprinkling mapping info through your code. This is one of those cases where clinging to the standard and saying everyone else is wrong is a pretty silly thing to do.