The spec specifically says that javax.persistence.Query#setLockMode should throw an IllesgalStateException when called on a query that represents a native query. Our implementation has not done that historically since we do have (to varying degrees) the ability to apply locking to the SQL. However the 2.1 TCK is checking this and we are failing because we do not throw the IllesgalStateException :( So I changed up our impl to throw the IllesgalStateException to pass the TCK. I did add a new query hint to allow users who might be relying on this to keep on trucking. So instead of: Query q = em.createNative( query ); // this is what is illegal q.setLockMode( theLockMode ); users would need to do: Query q = em.createNative( query ); q.setHint( QueryHints.NATIVE_LOCKMODE, theLockMode ); Just an FYI...