http://in.relation.to/Bloggers/HibernateORM420CR1Released Hibernate ORM 4.2.0.CR1 was just released. The full changelog can be viewed here: https://hibernate.onjira.com/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10031&... This release included a few notable bug fixes and improvements: - https://hibernate.onjira.com/browse/HHH-465 : "nulls first" and "nulls last" syntax in HQL ordering - https://hibernate.onjira.com/browse/HHH-1917 : automatically delete orphaned JoinTable rows on a bulk delete affecting a Many-To-Many association - https://hibernate.onjira.com/browse/HHH-2448 : deterministic column aliases, regardless of mapping ordering -- mainly affects clustering environments - https://hibernate.onjira.com/browse/HHH-7797 : the logic handling unique columns and constraints was entirely re-written and improved In addition, a handful of performance improvements went in. So far, we have seen dramatic improvements in JBoss benchmarking. - https://hibernate.onjira.com/browse/HHH-7746 : additional batch loading algorithms (use "hibernate.batch_fetch_style" in your settings -- see the new Enum for choices) - https://hibernate.onjira.com/browse/HHH-7872 : improves L2 caching of reference data (enable with "hibernate.cache.use_reference_entries") - https://hibernate.onjira.com/browse/HHH-7902 : Originally, JDBC types (Connection, Statement, ResultSet, etc.) were wrapped with Java Proxies to introduce resource management, logging, etc. The proxying was shown to be a performance hotspot, so they were entirely removed. The functionality was replaced with a new set of internal contracts/helpers. As usual, thank you to the community for all the support and hard work! JBoss Nexus: https://repository.jboss.org/nexus/content/groups/public/org/hibernate Maven Central: http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/hibernate/hibernate-core (should update in a couple of days) SourceForge: https://sourceforge.net/projects/hibernate/files/hibernate4 Downloads: http://sourceforge.net/projects/hibernate/files/hibernate4/4.2.0.CR1/hibe... or http://sourceforge.net/projects/hibernate/files/hibernate4/4.2.0.CR1/hibe... Brett Meyer Red Hat Software Engineer, Hibernate +1 260.349.5732