I have a blob field defined as part of a Hibernate Config file, it is one of four properties:
<property name="handlerBlob" type="blob" insert="true" optimistic-lock="true" not-null="false" update="true" unique="false" lazy="false">
<column name="SERIALIZED_HANDLER" not-null="false" />
</property>

The blob field is implemented using the fix described here:
http://hansonchar.blogspot.com/2005/06/ ... te-in.html

We do a hibernate.clear() before accessing Hibernate objects and a hibernate.flush() at the end of the operation. After I retrieve records from the database represented containing this field, when I do the flush() hibernate always marks the field as dirty and updates the versioning field.
Why is it doing this ?

The only way I can prevent this from happening is by setting the update attribute to false, but it needs to be true.