I know this issue has appeared in the past, but I'd like to revisit HB-742 because foreign-key="name" is not an option for those of us using JPA annotations.

I too am disappointed by the cryptic constraints that are generated by hbm2ddl, and would like to see them more intuitive. I do understand that some databases have strict limits on constraint names, but can't this be something that the Dialect or DatabaseMetaData can help with? I would hate to see my DDL hampered because of the lowest common denominator. As well, I want my annotations to be high-level and ignorant of the underlying database so that I can deploy the same code on multiple database platforms.

Oracle has a 30 character limit, which isn't much, but an attempt to make the constraint less cryptic would be nice.

Any ideas?

so open a request against hibernate annotations to add in foreign key name constraints ;)

the foreign keygeneration should actually be part of the NamingStrategy - you could look into providing a patch for that.