Hi, I would not recommend usage of FetchType.EAGER in a many-to-many relationship, because on loading one parent, it might happen that half of the database is loaded, if fetching cascades from parent to childs to other parents to other childs and so on ;-). Better use LAZY and provide some methods in the session bean to fetch the parents of the children of a parent. Best regards Wolfgang View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4205690#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...