Dear all, I'm trying to use cascading deletion but it doesn't seem to work. " If you can guarantee that no other object (or row in any other table) holds a reference to these bids, you can make the deletion transitive. Hibernate (and JPA) offer a cascading option for this purpose. You can enable cascading for the delete operation <set name="bids" inverse="true" cascade="save-update, delete"> " Only works for me if I'm mapping to a Set... If I use List it stops working and returns java.util.ConcurrentModificationException... Any ideas? <class name="SimpleDatabase" table="TERM"> ..... <list name="optionalFields" table="OPTIONAL_FIELD" lazy="false" fetch="subselect" inverse="true" cascade="save-update, delete, delete-orphan" <key column="TERM_ID"/> <list-index column="FIELD_ORDER" base="1"/> <one-to-many class="SimpleDatabaseOptionalField"/> </list> </class> <class name="SimpleDatabaseOptionalField" table="OPTIONAL_FIELD"> <id name="fieldId" column="FIELD_ID" type="integer"> <generator class="sequence"> <param name="sequence">SEQ_XREFDB</param> </generator> </id> <property name="termId" column="TERM_ID" type="integer"/> <property name="fieldOrder" column="FIELD_ORDER" type="integer" not-null="true" /> <property name="description" column="DESCRIPTION" type="string" not-null="true"/> <property name="xmlPropertyName" column="XML_PROPERTY_NAME" type="string" not-null="true"/> <property name="rdfPropertyName" column="RDF_PROPERTY_NAME" type="string" not-null="true"/> </class> Thanks in advance, Teresa