The failure goes away after the revert on my side (glassfish 4.1/hibernate 4.3.8 reverted). Apologies for the delayed response since after the change I got some other errors. However they seem to be caused by how our internal queries are created. For example DELETE FROM Attachment a WHERE EXISTS (FROM EmailObject eo WHERE eo=a.email.... gives an error because it cannot find class FROM for some yet unidentified reason.