I am trying to call a legacy stored function in an Oracle9i DB from Java using Hibernate. The function is declared like this:

create or replace FUNCTION Transferlocation_Fix (mnemonic_code IN VARCHAR2)
   RETURN VARCHAR2

After several failed tries and extensive googling, I found this thread on the Hibernate forums which suggested a mapping like this:

<sql-query name="TransferLocationFix" callable="true">
    <return-scalar column="retVal" type="string"/>
    select Transferlocation_Fix(:mnemonic) as retVal from dual
</sql-query>

My code to execute it is

    Query query = session.getNamedQuery("TransferLocationFix");
    query.setParameter("mnemonic", "FC3");
    String result = (String) query.uniqueResult();

and the resulting log is

DEBUG (org.hibernate.jdbc.AbstractBatcher:366) -  - about to open PreparedStatement (open PreparedStatements: 0, globally: 0)
DEBUG (org.hibernate.SQL:401) -  - select Transferlocation_Fix(?) as retVal from dual
TRACE (org.hibernate.jdbc.AbstractBatcher:484) -  - preparing statement
TRACE (org.hibernate.type.StringType:133) -  - binding 'FC3' to parameter: 2
TRACE (org.hibernate.type.StringType:133) -  - binding 'FC3' to parameter: 2

java.lang.NullPointerException
at oracle.jdbc.ttc7.TTCAdapter.newTTCType(TTCAdapter.java:300)
at oracle.jdbc.ttc7.TTCAdapter.createNonPlsqlTTCColumnArray(TTCAdapter.java:270)
at oracle.jdbc.ttc7.TTCAdapter.createNonPlsqlTTCDataSet(TTCAdapter.java:231)
at oracle.jdbc.ttc7.TTC7Protocol.doOall7(TTC7Protocol.java:1924)
at oracle.jdbc.ttc7.TTC7Protocol.parseExecuteDescribe(TTC7Protocol.java:850)
at oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleStatement.doExecuteQuery(OracleStatement.java:2599)
at oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleStatement.doExecuteWithTimeout(OracleStatement.java:2963)
at oracle.jdbc.driver.OraclePreparedStatement.executeUpdate(OraclePreparedStatement.java:658)
at oracle.jdbc.driver.OraclePreparedStatement.execute(OraclePreparedStatement.java:736)
at com.mchange.v2.c3p0.impl.NewProxyCallableStatement.execute(NewProxyCallableStatement.java:3044)
at org.hibernate.dialect.Oracle8iDialect.getResultSet(Oracle8iDialect.java:379)
at org.hibernate.jdbc.AbstractBatcher.getResultSet(AbstractBatcher.java:193)
at org.hibernate.loader.Loader.getResultSet(Loader.java:1784)
at org.hibernate.loader.Loader.doQuery(Loader.java:674)
at org.hibernate.loader.Loader.doQueryAndInitializeNonLazyCollections(Loader.java:236)
at org.hibernate.loader.Loader.doList(Loader.java:2220)
at org.hibernate.loader.Loader.listIgnoreQueryCache(Loader.java:2104)
at org.hibernate.loader.Loader.list(Loader.java:2099)
at org.hibernate.loader.custom.CustomLoader.list(CustomLoader.java:289)
at org.hibernate.impl.SessionImpl.listCustomQuery(SessionImpl.java:1695)
at org.hibernate.impl.AbstractSessionImpl.list(AbstractSessionImpl.java:142)
at org.hibernate.impl.SQLQueryImpl.list(SQLQueryImpl.java:152)
at org.hibernate.impl.AbstractQueryImpl.uniqueResult(AbstractQueryImpl.java:811)
at com.my.project.SomeClass.method(SomeClass.java:202)
...

Any clues what am I doing wrong? Or any better ways to call this stored function?