In the Hibernate reference documentation anonymous wrote : Note that load() will throw an unrecoverable exception if there is no matching database row. If the class is mapped with a proxy, load() just returns an uninitialized proxy and does not actually hit the database until you invoke a method of the proxy. This behaviour is very useful if you wish to create an association to an object without actually loading it from the database. It also allows multiple instances to be loaded as a batch if batch-size is defined for the class mapping. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3961142#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...