If anything, it’s something that should be available at a more granular level, at the level of a given embeddable class.

Gavin King More at the property level, where the @Embedded annotation is. This is about having properties populated with empty composites instead of null, so I don’t see why specifying this at the embeddable class level would make sense.

And if your application is written in such a way that you always expect embedded properties to be non-null, then it does make sense to set this globally.