This was posted on the Hibernate forum a few years back when asked about why this worked in Hibernate 2 but not in Hibernate 3:
Limit was never a supported clause
in HQL. You are meant to use
setMaxResults().
So if it worked in Hibernate 2, it seems that was by coincidence, rather than by design. I think this was because the Hibernate 2 HQL parser would replace the bits of the query that it recognised as HQL, and leave the rest as it was, so you could sneak in some native SQL. Hibernate 3, however, has a proper AST HQL Parser, and it’s a lot less forgiving.
I think Query.setMaxResults() really is your only option.