This functionality is supported in plain hibernate (http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/v3/reference/en/html/mapping.html#mapping-entityname);

I'm curious as to why this is not the case for hibernate when working as persistence provider (fails with ).

AFAIK, spec does not restrict this, or does it? I saw earlier this year a JIRA was logged to implement this as a new feature for the Hibernate Annotations project (http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/hibernate/browse/ANN-569),
but it was closed.

Why was that? Any response will be deeply appreciated.

Regards,