Bulk Delete on the owning side of a ManyToMany relation needs to delete corresponding rows from the JoinTable ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Key: HHH-1917 URL: https://hibernate.onjira.com/browse/HHH-1917 Project: Hibernate ORM Issue Type: Improvement Components: core Affects Versions: 3.2.0.cr2 Environment: Hibernate 3.2 cr2 Hibernate Annotations 3.2.0.CR1 Hibernate Entity Manager 3.2.0.CR1 Oracle 10.1, with Oracle 10.2 JDBC Driver Reporter: Keenan Ross Emmanuel says in http://forum.hibernate.org/viewtopic.php?t=961140, [quote]I also know we need to fix some limitations regarding associations table updates / delete and bulk operations[/quote] This issue provides a reminder that this task is pending. For bulk deletes, consider this scenario: Assume Person and Group entities in a bidirectional ManyToMany relationship with Group as the owning side. This implies a Join table, with the default name of Group_Person. Currently issuing em.createQuery("delete from Group").executeUpdate(); makes no attempt to delete the corresponding rows from Group_Person, even though Group is the owning side, giving constraint errors. Since Group_Person has no corresponding entity, I don't think the spec's prohibition on lifecycle operations or cascading applies here. The only workarround is to individually delete the Groups. --keenan