Is it possible to force inserting a new record instead of updating an existing record?

I've a class "User" with a many-to-one relation to the "Contract" class. When the contract of a user is changed, a new contract record should be inserted in the contracts table instead of updating the existing one.

- You can try an "instead of" trigger delegating this functionality to the database
- build the logic in your business layer.
- checkout the hibernate event model. Somewhere in a before update phase you probably can change the object to a new instance

Probably building this in the business layer is the best method for us to implement this behavior.