Hibernate generates invalid SQL query with MySQL

If you don't have an error in your SQL statement, then you might want to check your table column name as it can contain a predefined name that Mysql uses; for example 'column' which can't be used as a table column name

Another situation when you might have this exception is when you have reserved words as columns for the table. For example 'to' and 'from' are not suitable clumn names for MySQL. It is obviously bug in Hibernate, that it doesn't check such columns and moreover continues to work with no error even if table is not created.

Standard SQL specifies this optional syntax for INSERT:

INSERT INTO <Table Name> DEFAULT VALUES

This is legal SQL syntax, supported, for example, by Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and SQLite, but not by Oracle, IBM DB2, or MySQL.

MySQL supports other syntax that achieve the same result:

INSERT INTO <Table Name> () VALUES ()

INSERT INTO <Table Name> (col1, col2, col3) VALUES (DEFAULT, DEFAULT, DEFAULT)

In Hibernate, you should configure the SQL dialect properly, and it's up to Hibernate to generate valid SQL for the target RDBMS brand.

import org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration;

Configuration cfg = new Configuration();
cfg.setProperty("hibernate.dialect", "org.hibernate.dialect.MySQLInnoDBDialect");

You can also specify properties by placing a file named hibernate.properties in a root directory of the classpath.