With release 2.0 support for Hibernate 3 has been added and support for Hibernate 2.0 removed. If you need support for Hibernate 2.0, then make sure you download the 1.1 version.
The Microsoft JDBC driver doesn't allow a recordset contain Image or NVarchar data to be read multiple times. Each column may be read once, from left to right order. While technically complient with the JDBC spec, this causes problems in multiple systems in Hibernate and ColdFusion.
This proxy wraps the Microsoft JDBC Recordset and caches the data, allowing the data to be read in any order multiple times. Additionally, it appears that the recordset cache is faster to read from then the MS JDBC Recordset directly for multiple accesses.
Note: the various other offerings that do not suffer from this problem. It is widely considered that the JDBC Driver from Microsoft is not a very good one. One solution that we have used is from jTDS, a fellow SourceForge project!