I’ve been so buried in HQL land, I sometimes forget to comment on the non-HQL approach. If a developer is already using an HQL query, and using a bad session management pattern (session-per-query or something), they could unintentionally be dependent on the (non-proxy) existing Hibernate behavior where it auto-loads the Owner object. This change would cause their app to flip out when Hibernate tries to lazy-load, but the session is already closed. At this point, it would be best if they were introduced to open-session-in-view, but I thought I’d at least throw a bone to developers who might try this and get unexpected results. Sounds contrived, but I’ve seen it, so I thought I’d mention it.