Gavin... Then I guess you're saying for me, this is a really bad idea. :) Christian... I dunno. I guess to me it just seems somewhat backwards to have to always be merging your entities and/or doing a query before every update. Especially when the documentation for merge suggests that it's mostly used to re-attach instances that have been serialized/deserialized. Not that I'm right. In fact, if you ask Gavin, I'm usually wrong. However, I just couldn't find anyone who would tell me why this is a bad thing, and I figured since Gavin did Seam and Hibernate, he'd be the man in the know. Thanks for your responses though. I'm gathering that this is a really bad thing to do, which is at least some of what I was hoping to find out. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3983855#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...