I am doing the simple property change on my persistent object. The object itself is retrieved by session.load() . I would expect that only the 'update' SQL query would be generated by Hibernate. Instead, I see the 'select' query first that corresponds to loading the object and then 'update'.

Is this normal behavior? If yes, that does not seem to be optimal. Or, what am I possibly doing wrong?

This is the code fragment:

try {
tx = session.beginTransaction();

Artist a = (Artist) session.load(Artist.class, 1);
a.setHometown("London");

tx.commit();
}
catch(Exception e) {
if (tx!=null) tx.rollback();
throw e;
}

Thank you!

That's normal. This section of the manual will shed some light, I think:
http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/v3/re ... -modifying

-Chris