Yoann Rodière ( https://hibernate.atlassian.net/secure/ViewProfile.jspa?accountId=557058%... ) *commented* on HHH-11936 ( https://hibernate.atlassian.net/browse/HHH-11936?atlOrigin=eyJpIjoiMDhkMT... ) Re: Stabilize "empty composites" feature ( https://hibernate.atlassian.net/browse/HHH-11936?atlOrigin=eyJpIjoiMDhkMT... ) I suppose it makes sense. We’d need an alternative before we remove the global setting though, because people do rely on this feature. I’ve seen business applications where embeddables where used to group together information within an entity that have a common theme. So let’s say in a Customer entity you’d have a ShippingSection , a LegalSection , etc. All those sections being, well, just ways to group information together in a more manageable fashion than just dropping everything at the root of the entity. And that structure does help developers when manipulating the entity throughout the application, especially when the IDE auto-completes your calls to getters. In that situation, a null “section” simply doesn’t make sense, and more importantly, it’s just inconvenient. You would have to check for nullness every time you call getShippingSection().setAddress("foo") , and manually set the embeddable to a non-null value. Or you’d have to write your getters in such a way that they automatically detect null embeddeds and initialize them with non-empty values. Sure, in some cases those “sections” could be separate entities with a @OneToOne association, but in the cases I encountered, that had to practical benefit and implied a slightly more complicated DB schema, so we decided against it. ( https://hibernate.atlassian.net/browse/HHH-11936#add-comment?atlOrigin=ey... ) Add Comment ( https://hibernate.atlassian.net/browse/HHH-11936#add-comment?atlOrigin=ey... ) Get Jira notifications on your phone! Download the Jira Cloud app for Android ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.atlassian.android.jira.... ) or iOS ( https://itunes.apple.com/app/apple-store/id1006972087?pt=696495&ct=Em... ) This message was sent by Atlassian Jira (v1001.0.0-SNAPSHOT#100214- sha1:d3cc1a2 )