Say I have a Customer object, and one of the mappings is many-to-one for a ZipCity. The ZipCity table maps zip codes to city names, but isn't 100% complete, so I'm going to need outer joins for it all to work, allowing customers with null ZipCity objects.

Most Customers have a zip that will map, but say one has a zip code that isn't in the ZipCity table.

This is where hibernate does indeed get all the outer joined records. In normal sql, that data for the joined zip that doesn't exist would have null data.

But hibernate seems to do another query on the ZipCity table to load that unjoined zip, and it fails, and the entire query fails.

Boy even this sounds confusing, I don't know how to distill it more! Bottom line is I would be ok if the first query just came back and left a null Zip object in there, but that second attempt kills me.

rick