Major Description
There's an on-going discussion on the dev mailing list concerning this problem (http://www.nabble.com/Eager-fetching-not-working-with-enums-and-lobs-tf4037105.html). Since I've gotten agreement on at least one aspect of the problem, I decided to open this JIRA Issue to document the problem.
Here's a summary of the problem:
I am finding that the supposed default action of Eager fetching is not happening with @Enumerated and @Lob fields. If I explicitly specify the @Basic annotation, then the fields are eagerly fetched. But, without this extraneous @Basic, these fields are lazily loaded. This action does not seem to be consistent with the spec. Nor, can I find any mention of this alternate behavior in our OpenJPA manual. Sounds like a bug to me. Any other insights?
This works (eager loading kicks in):
@Basic @Enumerated(EnumType.STRING)
private Gender gender;
This does not work (lazy loading kicks in):
@Enumerated(EnumType.STRING)
private Gender gender;
I have also tried to use defaults (without any annotations), and lazy loading still kicks in:
private Gender gender;
The JPA spec attempts to address this situation in section 9.1.18... Section 9.1.8 of the JPA spec indicates that @Basic is optional and applies to the following types:
"..Java primitive types, wrappers of the primitive types, java.lang.String, java.math.BigInteger,
java.math.BigDecimal, java.util.Date, java.util.Calendar, java.sql.Date,
java.sql.Time, java.sql.Timestamp, byte[], Byte[], char[], Character[],
enums, and any other type that implements Serializable."
And, since the default fetch type for @Basic is EAGER, it looks like we need to do eager fetching for both @Enumerated and @Lob fields unless otherwise overridden by a LAZY fetch type (ie. @Basic(fetch=LAZY)). Agree?
We're still working on the agreement... 
Thanks,
Kevin