I'm fairly new to Hibernate. I saved a new entity, lets say Foo, and I saw the SQL fly across my console with the corresponding insert statement. Cool.. Good...

When the service call is finished, however, hibernate proceeds to update two other tables that are referenced as foreign keys in my Foo entity. I don't feel this is valid because I didn't not make any changes to the other two entities, just set their primary key in my Foo entity.

The downside in my mind is on every update and insert, hibernate will trigger a whole slew of updates that essentially do nothing.

How can I disable this feature? Could it be due to the fact I am using optimistic offline locking with the @Version annotation?

Need to see your mappings to know for sure, but I bet you have some <one-to-many> associations that are not inverse. This is a recipe for what you're seeing. I just explained this in another post:

http://forum.hibernate.org/viewtopic.php?t=986558

But this is just a guess since you have not provided the information asked for when you posted...