Looking at the SQL output of my test, whenever I load a collection of objects that have a composite key (2 FKs, one property), the FKs are being eagerly fetched, even though the HBM does not turn off lazy loading.

I don't believe there's anything I need to do to cause proxying to happen, and CGLIB is loading properly. Is there anything else I should check?

I've made some changes, including removing the references from equals() and substituting the keys for the references as part of the composite key (p.328 of the book). No matter what, when the object is loaded, the reference is initialized. The only thing I can do is set fetch="join" to reduce 60 SQL commands to one.

Is there any reason that I cannot force this many-to-one to be a proxy?