JPA table "sequence" does not exist

I had never had this error before despite doing this kind of thing a hundred times. I found this error was because I had a hibernate property for creating tables in the persistence.xml but was using EclipseLink:

It was:

    <property name="hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto" value="create"/>

I changed to the following to fix the error:

    <property name="eclipselink.ddl-generation" value="drop-and-create-tables"/>
    <!-- or just value="create-tables" -->

If EclipseLink tries to access this table, that means that it's supposed to be there. GenerationType.AUTO means that EclipseLink chooses the most appropriate generation type for your database (MySQL). In this case, the choice is to use a table-based generator, which needs a table. See http://wiki.eclipse.org/EclipseLink/UserGuide/JPA/Basic_JPA_Development/Entities/Ids/GeneratedValue.

If you don't want to use this strategy, choose another one.

This exception can occur even if you use @GeneratedValue(strategy=GenerationType.IDENTITY)!

From the EclipseLink Wiki:

Note: IDENTITY strategy is database specific and not supported on all database. IDENTITY is supported on Sybase, DB2, SQL Server, MySQL, Derby, JavaDB, Informix, SQL Anywhere, H2, HSQL, Access, and Postgres databases.

I changed the database server and client from MySQL to MariaDB which is not supported for GenerationType.IDENTITY as stated above. So I had to add the following property to the persistence.xml:

<persistence ...
  <persistence-unit ...
  ...
  <properties>
    <property name="eclipselink.target-database" value="MySQL"/>
  </properties>
  ...