In the Hibernate documentation, it states that:

Lazy fetching may be completely disabled by setting lazy="false"

But what does this mean, exactly?

I have a mapping document with a class element that has lazy="false" and two one-to-many associations, yet if I load an instance of the class with:

Session.load(Class, Serializeable)

it doesn't load the other associations or collections.

So, in what sense has lazy fetching been disabled?

In other words, under what circumstances should I expect to see different behaviour between lazy="false" and lazy="true" when specified on a Hibernate "class" element?

Might it have something to do with access="field"? If you've set your default access type to field, setting class lazy="false" would cause all fields in the class to be fetched when any field was accessed.

Alternatively, it might refer to references to this class, rather than from it. The default lazy value on most associations is false: if you do something like <many-to-one class="ClassWithLazyFalse"/>, is it eagerly loaded?