Steve Ebersole thanks for the quick reply. actually it's AttributeConverter<SomeClass, String>. currently, Hibernate is using FallbackJavaTypeDescriptor or SerializableTypeDescriptor to perform dirty checking. So either serialize the object and compare the resulting byte[] or use SomeClass.equals(..) as fallback. What would make more sense to me and my usecase would be to rather convert to string using the converter and compare the result.