I'm trying to delete an entity and all of the related entities and when I show the sql that hibernate generates, it's showing update statements being created. This causes an issue because it's trying to update a foreign key with null. I have "cascade="all, delete-orphan"" on all of my one-to-many relationships and "cascade="all"" on the many-to-ones. I'm also using joined-subclasses that have "dynamic-update="true"" set on all of them. So, I'm simply not sure why hibernate is generating updates instead of delete statements.