Hi, In our test cases, we have a test which checks a lot of cascade configuration (it's more to document all the cascade behaviors than to really test an application). After the upgrade from Hibernate 4.0 to Hibernate 4.0.1, we have a test failing: - a person is linked to a company - if we delete a company, it should cascade to the persons due to the annotation @OneToMany(cascade = CascadeType.REMOVE) Company { @OneToMany(cascade = CascadeType.REMOVE) @JoinTable(name="company_employees4", joinColumns=@JoinColumn(name="company_id"), inverseJoinColumns=@JoinColumn(name="employees4_id")) private List<Person> employees4 = new LinkedList<Person>(); } In the case of a person linked to 2 companies - we have an exception with Hibernate 4.0: this is what we expect as the person is linked to another company and the database warns us about it thanks to the foreign key; - the delete is OK with 4.0.1 (no exception due to the foreign key) and if I try to get the person after that, it's still there so it seems as if the cascade is not triggered at all. Does it ring a bell to anyone? I don't have a lot of time atm to extract a self contained test case so if it's something obvious due to 4.0 -> 4.0.1 fixes, I might pass on this one. I checked the release notes without finding something which can explain this new behavior. If it's not something obvious, I'll try to work on a test case in the next few days. If so, pointers to where I should add the test in the code base are greatly appreciated. Thanks for your feedback. Thanks.

Hi Steve, On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 5:42 PM, Steve Ebersole&lt;steve(a)hibernate.org&gt; wrote: > This is unexpected and obviously unintended, but it is also clearly what the > spec says should happen. I have asked the spec lead about some possible > options that would probably still meet the intent of the spec (even if they > violate the wording) and would be more "natural". Thanks for your answer. Yes, it's surely not the desired behavior. Our applications don't rely on it so it's not that critical for us but I'm pretty sure it's going to surprise users. Do you plan to open a JIRA issue for this problem? Thanks.

On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 6:31 PM, Steve Ebersole&lt;steve(a)hibernate.org&gt; wrote: > Well really the trouble is that you are not managing the associations in > memory. I understand the behavior is surprising, but had you simply cleaned > up the Person reference from all its associations (as the JPA spec says you > have to anyway) you would not have gotten this surprise. That's what we do in our applications. This is just a unit test to show all the cascade features to our developers, what they can do, when they fail and so on. The fact that a delete operation is silently ignored is disturbing IMHO.