It seems like the problem is broader than that. It occurs whenever hibernate wishes to alter cache in Synchronization.afterCompletion() - i.e. whenever Hibernate chooses to execute org.hibernate.action.BulkOperationCleanupAction.evictEntityRegions(). In our specific case this happened against *ENTITY* region because we used hql Query.executeUpdate method. In that case, it seems, Hibernate chooses not to be granular (ie alter/remove only entities affected by the HQL update), but rather to simply evict the entire ENTITY region. Perhaps this will supplement your thinking on http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/hibernate/browse/HHH-3818 I worked around our specific problem, by ensuring Hibernate does not execute the evict - i.e. by replacing Query.executeUpdate with domain model methods. I am trying to follow your discussion on lock striping but - thus far - have fairly little understanding of what's going on ;- View the original post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4219212#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...