Sorry, I have found the Hibernate bug describing this: http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/hibernate/browse/ANN-140?page=all (It is amazing that you always find the bug report only after you tried to describe the problem yourself.) Since I don't know anything about the hibernate sources I will not even try to supply the 3k lines mentioned in the bug report but I have a dirty little workaround: | @Entity | @Inheritance(strategy=JOINED) | //@DiscriminatorColumn(name="YOUR_DTYPE") | public abstract class parent { | | @Id | Integer id; | | @Column(name="YOUR_DTYPE",length=31) | public String getDiscriminatorValue() { | | DiscriminatorValue discriminatorValueAnnotation = this.getClass().getAnnotation(DiscriminatorValue.class); | | if (discriminatorValueAnnotation != null) { | return discriminatorValueAnnotation.value(); | } | | return this.getClass().getSimpleName(); | } | | public void setDiscriminatorValue(String dummy) { | } | | } | It is double plus unbeautiful but it works. Should this ever be fixed you can simply remove the workaround and everything should work as expected. Regards Felix View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4008016#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...