Straight from the documentation. This explains your problem exactly i believe:
However, this code
Parent p = (Parent) session.Load(typeof(Parent), pid);
// Get one child out of the set
IEnumerator childEnumerator = p.Children.GetEnumerator();
childEnumerator.MoveNext();
Child c = (Child) childEnumerator.Current;
p.Children.Remove(c);
c.Parent = null;
session.Flush();
will not remove c from the database; it will only remove the link to p (and cause a NOT NULL constraint violation, in this case). You need to explicitly Delete() the Child.
Parent p = (Parent) session.Load(typeof(Parent), pid);
// Get one child out of the set
IEnumerator childEnumerator = p.Children.GetEnumerator();
childEnumerator.MoveNext();
Child c = (Child) childEnumerator.Current;
p.Children.Remove(c);
session.Delete(c);
session.Flush();
Now, in our case, a Child can't really exist without its parent. So if we remove a Child from the collection, we really do want it to be deleted. For this, we must use cascade="all-delete-orphan".
<set name="Children" inverse="true" cascade="all-delete-orphan">
<key column="parent_id"/>
<one-to-many class="Child"/>
</set>
Edit:
With regards to the inverse stuff, i believe this only determines how the sql is generated, see this doc for more info.
One thing to note is, have you got
not-null="true"
on the many-to-one relationship in your hibernate config?