Mihalcea Vlad One more question... is the "associated" state in question already associated with the Session?

Basically there is some question as to what exactly PessimisticLockScope.EXTENDED means as far as the type of lock acquired on the associated data. The spec actually does not say. Hibernate follows its legacy lock cascading paradigm of locking the associated data, but not propagating the requested lock-mode. Instead it propagates a (PESSIMISTIC_)READ lock.

The difference is whether this gets categorized as a bug or a feature request.