The problem is that I have an Employee object associated with every Document. When the Employee goes away, the link has to be severed. Being able to do that implicitly (with cascade=CascadeType.REMOVE) would be the ideal solution. Right now I have a hack involving a custom annotation, parameter injection and an UPDATE query that fires whenever an Employee is deleted. Being able to have an association to Document directly would be a much cleaner solution. Document doesn't have its own table so it doesn't need a PK of its own. It'd be great if I could have getId() defined in Document, and override it in subclasses and set @GeneratedValue along with any specific generators there. I don't see any theoretical problems with that approach. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4108249#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...