You have to pick your battles. It's convenient that Hibernate will do these things for you, but I have seen lots of times when the order Hibernate wants to remo

You have to pick your battles. It's convenient that Hibernate will do these things for you, but I have seen lots of times when the order Hibernate wants to remove something causes an integrity violation. For instance, a not-null foreign key reference in a linking table; sometimes Hibernate seems to try setting the value to null before deleting the referenced entity, leading to an integrity violation. There have been times when I couldn't figure out how to make Hibernate do this the right way (reversing the order of its deletes and skipping the unnecessary set-null step) so I instead just lifted the constraint. I hate when I have to do that, because ideally Hibernate should just live with whatever schema I have given it. Another example is trying to depend on CASCADE in the database. The settings you need to make to get Hibernate to accept this are quite arcane and force you to manually worry about list indexes in the Java code. Yet another example of a place where Hibernate, which ought not be telling me how to make my database or my Java code, instead winds up forcing me to take certain decisions in both.