BTW, I should probably clarify that I'm not using JPAQL just to look up entities by id. For that I always do use find(). The JPAQL query I'm using has other constraints – I just distilled it down to that simplified example to illustrate that a JPAQL query for a superclass ends up imposing subclasses' relationship constraints instead of doing left outer joins. Hope this makes sense to the Hibernate folks who will hopefully read this soon...