I have an application where I am caching all objects represeneed by tables what are small and rarely changed. When I map a foreigh key to these objects hibernate seems to create a new instance rather than using an existing value. Short of a custom accessor which reads the cached value how do I tell hibernate to reuse existing instances

You mean object returned is not the same as the one insterted instance speaking.

This is due to tx consistency, hibernate has to give you another instance you can update and rollback

No consider a table like States - I do not ever want to update or rollback and would like a way to tell hibernate that

Why is it a problem not to have the same instance