WRT the Hibernate tests failing... not necessarily.Even if the things come back ordered, that could just be a coincidence. A good test would check the "mapping model" built from the metadata (xml/annotations) to make sure that the collection is interpreted as a "PersistentList" and that the order column is named as expected. I cannot say for sure that there are tests that do that specifically for annotations as the bulk of the annotation stuff was not written by me.