http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/orm/3.3/reference/en/html/mapping.html:
select-before-update (optional - defaults to false): specifies that Hibernate should never perform an SQL UPDATE unless it is certain that an object is actually modified. Only when a transient object has been associated with a new session using update(), will Hibernate perform an extra SQL SELECT to determine if an UPDATE is actually required.

I have trouble getting the above highlighted statement from Documentation. Why Hibernate does the extra SQL SELECT statement on Transient object i.e. when the object is new anyways, just need to create/save right. Am I misisng something?