I'm a little confused whether not-null affects the runtime behavior. Section 3.3.2 suggests that it does while Section 3.7.3 states that it doesn't. Can you clarify.

Thanks,
Sanjiv

Section 3.3.2

However, it

The second statement isn't entirely correct and I'll get that fixed in the reprint. Hibernate will throw a RuntimeException on saving if a property is null, but declared as non-nullable. A very minor and unimportant optimization.