I' ve been wresting with this issue for the last 2 days.  I get this error:

Exception in thread "main" org.hibernate.HibernateException: The dialect was not set. Set the property hibernate.dialect.  

I googled and found that my db info might be off but i checked and its all working ok.   a bit stumped at this point.

Here is my Persistence.xml file:

<persistence xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence"

    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"

    xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence

        http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence/persistence_2_0.xsd"

    version="2.0">

    <persistence-unit name="springmvc">

        <provider>org.hibernate.ejb.HibernatePersistence</provider>

        <properties>

            <property name="hibernate.connection.driver_class" value="org.postgresql.Driver" />

            <property name="hibernate.dialect" value="org.hibernate.dialect.PostgreSQLDialect" />

        </properties>

    </persistence-unit>

</persistence>

Just to close the loop on this if someone else comes across this issue.   I had the wrong Spring Framework:sprint-test version and made sure all Spring related items were set to 3.2.3.RELEASE