I'm using JPA, Hibernate 3.3 and Spring Transactions my database access. I'm noticing odd behavior during a transaction. Essentially if I pull an entity and then make modifications to it but never actually call the merge or persist function in the EntityManager Hibernate still saves all my changes. Unfortunately I can't just make my changes outside of the transaction so i'm wondering how I can enforce Hibernate to not save any changes unless I explicitly call the merge function.

Perhaps you could evict the entity, dislodging it from the Sessions grasps?

That could work. Unfortunately I don't see any detach or evict functions in EntityManager. How do I evict an entity from JPA's EntityManager?