No, (maybe yes, but currently It seems performance impact is low enough - needs some testing though) for hibernate validator: 1)there are installations where I need to change a column to be longer than what is configured into the validator annotation. Currently I would have to recompile. Switching off check or only switch off throwing the exception would be fine. 2) there are installations upgrading from an old versions where no hibernate-validator has been used from my side and there are codeparts of customer code not really restricting the column length as required. That should better run through and put records into the database (warning is ok) even if there now is a length restriction checked with hibernate-validator. There are database dialects that require field lengths so you have to apply it even if you do not want it (think of hsql that creates a @lob annotated field to a lenght 256) and there are cases where the database table has been changed after the database has been created to be longer.