Hibernate version: 3.2

Name and version of the database you are using: DB2

I am coding what was supposed to be a fairly simple UI for administering some data... and then internal politics reared its ugly head and made things interesting. Management now does not want the tool to make changes to production directly. Instead, they want to point it at a staging environment (which mirrors production), capture the changes made, and export them as a SQL file that can be handled off to the DB support guys like any other change. Yeah, I know this is somewhat defective-by-design... but it is what it is, and I don't have the clout to change the big picture.

Is it even possible (generally speaking) to use Hibernate such that it will read data from the database, and allow you to make changes to the data objects, yet not actually write those changes to the database? If Hibernate has the ability to capture the changes made, that would be even better... but I could settle for handling that logic at the controller level. I'm just trying to figure out whether Hibernate is still a usable option in this scenario at all. Thanks in advance!

After having my morning caffeine, it occurs to me that I could simply never call the session's "save()" method. That might be fine, although I may have to juggle some state issues since this is a web app (i.e. put the dirty objects on the HTTP session between page loads). Does anything get written to the database in absence of a session "save()" call, or would that be safe in terms of not ever writing to production?