I have been able to reproduce this looking at it for someone. I'll push my test.

Emmanuel Bernard This gets into some of your older code that I am not quite sure what the intent was. Perhaps you can help. org.hibernate.cfg.AbstractPropertyHolder#getOverriddenColumn seems to try to handle this case. But ultimately what happens is that null gets returned from there, and then the "bad" value still gets passed to the NamingStrategy. The default naming strategy is fine because it just chops off the prefix (including the ...collection&&element. part). However the DefaultComponentSafeNamingStrategy tries to include the whole path which is where it gets into trouble. Where exactly were you expecting the replacement of this "placeholder" to take place? It seems like a leakage to handle it in the NamingStrategy as suggested above (every NamingStrategy would have to handle it then).