I added c3p0 for pooling in JPA, but encountered an exception

Unable to load class [org.hibernate.service.jdbc.connections.internal.C3P0ConnectionProvider]

My configuration looked like

<property name="hibernate.connection.provider_class"
          value="org.hibernate.connection.C3P0ConnectionProvider" />
<property name="hibernate.c3p0.max_size" value="10" />
<property name="hibernate.c3p0.min_size" value="0" />
<property name="hibernate.c3p0.acquire_increment" value="5" />
<property name="hibernate.c3p0.idle_test_period" value="60" />
<property name="hibernate.c3p0.max_statements" value="0" />
<property name="hibernate.c3p0.timeout" value="100" />	    

Details about these properties and other defined at link

Looking at log trace it’s not difficult to figure out that jar is not correct, so first change, upgrade to latest c3p0 artifact.

Previous

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.hibernate</groupId>
    <artifactId>hibernate-c3p0</artifactId>
    <version>3.6.10.Final</version>
</dependency>

Latest

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.hibernate</groupId>
    <artifactId>hibernate-c3p0</artifactId>
    <version>4.1.9.Final</version>
</dependency>

After changing this, it worked but printed an Warning

WARN - HHH000208: org.hibernate.connection.C3P0ConnectionProvider has been deprecated in favor of org.hibernate.service.jdbc.connections.internal.C3P0ConnectionProvider; that provider will be used instead.

This indicates that provider_class should be changed to remove the depricated class, so it should be

<property name="hibernate.connection.provider_class"
          value="org.hibernate.service.jdbc.connections.internal.C3P0ConnectionProvider" />

This cleanly integrated the c3p0 implementation.