Currently, Hibernate's implementation of javax.persistence.metamodel.PluralAttribute#isAssociation always returns true. I haven't found anything in JSR 338 (yet) that refers to an element collection as an association. I don't see a good definition of "association", but the term is used with respect to entities. I also see examples of @ElementCollection with @AttributeOverride, but none with @AssociationOverride. The change suggested in HHH-10888 is to have PluralAttributeImpl#isAssociation return true only for one-to-many and many-to-many. I believe this is correct, but it breaks a couple of tests that specifically check if an element collection is an association. I wanted to pass this by you in case I'm missing something here. Please take a look at the pull request to see the fix and the required test changes. [1] Thanks, Gail https://github.com/hibernate/hibernate-orm/pull/1447