I'm working on a java application which makes an extensive usage of hibernate's relation mapping system. The later offers several ways to define association mapping. We mostly use many-to-one relation declarations. The problem comes from the database. It's a pre-relational, pre-transactional, legacy database running on a prehistorical IBM zSeries host. The data on this database is very often dumb or corrupted. The lack of a proper referential integrity support and the foolish design make us end up quite often following non-existent relations.

Happily, hibernate provides a semantic which allow the application not to bother when a relation is missing, just as the legacy app does. This semantic is the not-found="ignore" parameter on the relation definition.

However, the usage of this semantic resumes to open very wide the doors to oblivion.

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