heey! :) Doesn't this change the behavior radically ? ...and how should our validator know which sequence of calls it should use ...i hate bugs ;0) Looking in fisheye this change were done almost 4 years ago... http://fisheye.jboss.org/changelog/Hibernate?cs=8918 for http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/hibernate/browse/ANN-176 where it seems to be done very deliberately ? are you sure this is a proper change ? <http://fisheye.jboss.org/changelog/Hibernate?cs=8918> Yes, but that we will just pick up automatically since it does not change the sequence of calls done to the namingstrategy. Anyway, for now we'll just focus on the JPA behavior since that is the most relevant for JPA Project validation at least ;) /max