The only reason I'm using the ordercolumn because without it LazyCollection.EXTRA doesn't allow you to get an item from the collection without fully initializing it, because it will be a persistentbag. I wonder if there is another way for this? You can see the conflict here: if you want an Extra Lazy Collection (because initializing it kills your server), you need an index column. But with an extra lazy collection it makes more sense to use mappedBy and save collection items directly without adding them to the collection manually. Wow, this issue was created two years ago.