Question

I am confused as to the stance Hibernate takes when it determines which column information to persist. Some places I read online says it will only update dirty fields, some people say that it is also database dependant (ie. Using hibernate with Oracle 9 will persist all fields of an object, even if only 1 is dirty).

Is there a correct way to handle this if you only want column xxx to change? Or should that simply be abstracted to a different table? Lastly, is any of this affected whether you use Session#get or Session#load?

Answer 1

Use dynammic-update Hibernate mapping attribute:

<class ... dynamic-update="true">

Source: Hibernate – dynamic-update attribute example.