It rather question for hibernate forum... forum.hibernate.org With getter are problems. Hibernate check getters if object changed. And when you get object from database and no explicity write, hibernate invoke flush and compare hydrated objects before transaction and after. Getters return other values and hibernate executes additional updates (even you only executes selects - true in standard way but i guess it is configurable with cache mode or something), this may ends with very poor performance with huge amount of updates. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4170959#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...