Sorry if this has been asked, but it is terribly hard to search for. We are facing a problem with optimistic locking (optimistic-lock="version") and object graphs. We have written tests to prove that if some field or fields in the parent are modified and saveOrUpdate() is called, then the children are ALL updated, even though they haven't been modified. The VERSION number is increased and the "audit fields" are updated. We use custom audit interceptor (extends org.hibernate.EmptyInterceptor) to populate our "created by/when" and "updated by/when" fields. All tables (parents and children) have this audit fields. Collections are mapped with cascade="all, delete-orphan". Anybody see this problem before and have a solution? Any advice on how to figure out why the children are being needlessly updated? Thanks!

I would say that this is normal Hibernate behaviour.

You have mapped your collections using cascade="all ..." this tells hibernate that all operations should be cascaded along the association. From Hibernate doc

Thats probably why the version gets incremented even though the actual child has not been modified.

For more information read
http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/stable/core/reference/en/html/objectstate.html#objectstate-transitive