Does hibernate provide a mechanism to update only the modified properties (columns) with out loading the data. If an object with only modified attributes and the unique identifier is given to the hibernate (no values set for other attributes), would hibernate generate query to update only the passed in attributes.

this would help us no to load the data and just pass in the object with only the changed attributes (properties).

I could not find any information on this. I had tried to update a table only with few modified attributes and hibernate updated the other columns which were not modified as well when I set the dynamic-update to 'true". Basically the values of other columns were wiped out.

One way is to load the values of all the columns of the table and set the modified attributes and save.
The other mechanism I can think of is to map multiple classes to the same table and do the updates as required. But I am not sure whether this can be done.

thanks,
TM