Not sure this is a good idea, because you _want_ to break repeatable read isolation of your conversation/transaction. But you can with a scalar query, a query that doesn't return entity instances (which would hit the persistence context cache): select e.statusProperty from MyEntity e This goes straight to the database and returns this value, the only cache that could be between you and the data is the Hibernate second-level query cache (which isn't enabled by default). View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4026376#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...