It looks like the update statement generated by EntityManager includes all columns instead of the modified columns. This behaviour can be overridden only by using the hibernate @Entity annotation with dynamic-update=true. This reduces the portability of the code.

Whereas this feature is available out-of-the-box in the glassfish impl.

Will there be a future version of Hibernate EntityManager that will incorporate this feature out of the box??

Probably not - since this has been a default with Hibernate as far as I know.

I don't really understand how such a thing reduce code portability.
Plus adding @org.hibernate.annotations.Entity in your domain model does not requires to have hibernate-annotations.jar in your classpath.

The default of glassfish is dynamic-uipdate=true, is that right?
This is usually faster (depends on DBs actually) to update everything than just the necessary columns.

Thanks for your resposne.

Updating all columns could be faster but in a scenario where only some of the fields (not affecting other fields) from different related entities need to be updated in a single transaction along with the parent entity's fields it is much easier to use the transitive persistence than using separate updates to the individual entities.

Secondly, any usage of org.hibernate.* within the code would require the appropriate hibernate jars in the classpath. The code will not work as is while using the glassfish persistence provider. The code has to be modified to remove reference to the hibernate specifics. This is what i meant by portability.

Lastly, Is there a possibility (in a future release) of extending the existing java.persistence.Entity annotation instead of requiring to include the additional org.hibernate.annotations.Entity annotation?

Thanks in advance

I don't think that's the case with annotations - that's what Emmanuel is trying to say - Emmanuel, am I right?