I'm running into a behavior related to hibernate while trying to update a child object. I've a version column property implemented for optimistic locking. I'll try to illustrate the issue by the following example.

Lets say I've a Company parent object . It has couple of child collection, Office, Inventory and Employee. Lets say, Office has a child entity Address. In this scenario, I'm trying to add a new Employee to the parent collection. After adding it, I noticed that hibernate has fired an insert for the new record as well couple of updates to increment the version number of Company and Office object. What baffled me is that why hibernate is updating the version of Office when adding an Employee. But it didn't update the version property of Inventory. On further research, I found that the version update happens for the sibling having a child. In our case, Office is getting updated since it has a child collection i.e. Address. At the sametime, update doesn't happen for Inventory since it doesn't have a child.

I'm not sure if this is how hibernate is supposed to behave. I've tried looking into the documents but unable to find anything worth. This unrelated updates is causing a performance overhead when I'm dealing with a batch of large collection data.

Any pointers will be highly appreciated.

I think not.
There' should be only an update to increment the version number of Company.
Try to use a newer version of hibernate.
I that not help, debug the code putting a breakpoint at EntityUpdateAction constructor.
This should help you find out who is triggering the UpdateAction on Office.