Hi all, I just want to mention that a user on the Hibernate forum created a framework on top of Hibernate: https://forum.hibernate.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1042072 https://github.com/babyfish-ct/babyfish The main concept is around the use of an ObjectModel that replaces the proxies and contains all the metadata to access the entities. Here an example on how to define an object model in Java: https://github.com/babyfish-ct/babyfish/blob/master/demo/babyfishdemo-om4... In JPA, the object model is generated during compile time and can be accessed using: private JPAObjectModelMetadata employeeOMM = JPAMetadatas.of(Company.class); The ObjectModel provides a fluent API to get lazy associations, disable/enable update on properties and so on. Cheers, Davide