So lets say you have Entities A and B with @ManyToMany relation on both sites with A being the owning side of the relation. Now lets assume that I delete a B that is associated with an A this gives me a foreign key error because now I have A still refering to a B that doesn't exist. What I would like is to have B removed from A's collection of B's when it is deleted. Is there any way to do this at the hibernate level or is this strictly something that the application has to take care of manually? Thanks. :)

Specify cascade="delete" on the collection thats mapping A's from B. That way, when you delete B, it cascades to the associations that it has and will remove entries from the association table as well.