In an implementation without much help from Hibernate, each interaction with the database occurs in a new Session and the developer is responsible for reloading all persistent instances from the database before manipulating them. This approach forces the application to carry out its own version checking to ensure conversation transaction isolation. This approach is the least efficient in terms of database access. It is the approach most similar to entity EJBs.

// foo is an instance loaded by a previous Session
session = factory.openSession();
Transaction t = session.beginTransaction();

int oldVersion = foo.getVersion();
session.load( foo, foo.getKey() ); // load the current state
if ( oldVersion != foo.getVersion() ) throw new StaleObjectStateException();
foo.setProperty("bar");

t.commit();
session.close();

The version property is mapped using <version>, and Hibernate will automatically increment it during flush if the entity is dirty.

Of course, if you are operating in a low-data-concurrency environment and don't require version checking, you may use this approach and just skip the version check. In that case, last commit wins will be the default strategy for your long conversations. Keep in mind that this might confuse the users of the application, as they might experience lost updates without error messages or a chance to merge conflicting changes.

Clearly, manual version checking is only feasible in very trivial circumstances and not practical for most applications. Often not only single instances, but complete graphs of modified objects have to be checked. Hibernate offers automatic version checking with either an extended Session or detached instances as the design paradigm.

A single Session instance and its persistent instances are used for the whole conversation, known as session-per-conversation. Hibernate checks instance versions at flush time, throwing an exception if concurrent modification is detected. It's up to the developer to catch and handle this exception (common options are the opportunity for the user to merge changes or to restart the business conversation with non-stale data).

The Session is disconnected from any underlying JDBC connection when waiting for user interaction. This approach is the most efficient in terms of database access. The application need not concern itself with version checking or with reattaching detached instances, nor does it have to reload instances in every database transaction.

// foo is an instance loaded earlier by the old session
Transaction t = session.beginTransaction(); // Obtain a new JDBC connection, start transaction

foo.setProperty("bar");

session.flush();    // Only for last transaction in conversation
t.commit();         // Also return JDBC connection
session.close();    // Only for last transaction in conversation

The foo object still knows which Session it was loaded in. Beginning a new database transaction on an old session obtains a new connection and resumes the session. Committing a database transaction disconnects a session from the JDBC connection and returns the connection to the pool. After reconnection, to force a version check on data you aren't updating, you may call Session.lock() with LockMode.READ on any objects that might have been updated by another transaction. You don't need to lock any data that you are updating. Usually you would set FlushMode.MANUAL on an extended Session, so that only the last database transaction cycle is allowed to actually persist all modifications made in this conversation. Hence, only this last database transaction would include the flush() operation, and then also close() the session to end the conversation.

This pattern is problematic if the Session is too big to be stored during user think time, e.g. an HttpSession should be kept as small as possible. As the Session is also the (mandatory) first-level cache and contains all loaded objects, we can probably use this strategy only for a few request/response cycles. You should use a Session only for a single conversation, as it will soon also have stale data.

(Note that earlier Hibernate versions required explicit disconnection and reconnection of a Session. These methods are deprecated, as beginning and ending a transaction has the same effect.)

Also note that you should keep the disconnected Session close to the persistence layer. In other words, use an EJB stateful session bean to hold the Session in a three-tier environment, and don't transfer it to the web layer (or even serialize it to a separate tier) to store it in the HttpSession.

The extended session pattern, or session-per-conversation, is more difficult to implement with automatic current session context management. You need to supply your own implementation of the CurrentSessionContext for this, see the Hibernate Wiki for examples.

Each interaction with the persistent store occurs in a new Session. However, the same persistent instances are reused for each interaction with the database. The application manipulates the state of detached instances originally loaded in another Session and then reattaches them using Session.update(), Session.saveOrUpdate(), or Session.merge().

// foo is an instance loaded by a previous Session
foo.setProperty("bar");
session = factory.openSession();
Transaction t = session.beginTransaction();
session.saveOrUpdate(foo); // Use merge() if "foo" might have been loaded already
t.commit();
session.close();

Again, Hibernate will check instance versions during flush, throwing an exception if conflicting updates occurred.

You may also call lock() instead of update() and use LockMode.READ (performing a version check, bypassing all caches) if you are sure that the object has not been modified.

You may disable Hibernate's automatic version increment for particular properties and collections by setting the optimistic-lock mapping attribute to false. Hibernate will then no longer increment versions if the property is dirty.

Legacy database schemas are often static and can't be modified. Or, other applications might also access the same database and don't know how to handle version numbers or even timestamps. In both cases, versioning can't rely on a particular column in a table. To force a version check without a version or timestamp property mapping, with a comparison of the state of all fields in a row, turn on optimistic-lock="all" in the <class> mapping. Note that this conceptually only works if Hibernate can compare the old and new state, i.e. if you use a single long Session and not session-per-request-with-detached-objects.

Sometimes concurrent modification can be permitted as long as the changes that have been made don't overlap. If you set optimistic-lock="dirty" when mapping the <class>, Hibernate will only compare dirty fields during flush.

In both cases, with dedicated version/timestamp columns or with full/dirty field comparison, Hibernate uses a single UPDATE statement (with an appropriate WHERE clause) per entity to execute the version check and update the information. If you use transitive persistence to cascade reattachment to associated entities, Hibernate might execute unnecessary updates. This is usually not a problem, but on update triggers in the database might be executed even when no changes have been made to detached instances. You can customize this behavior by setting select-before-update="true" in the <class> mapping, forcing Hibernate to SELECT the instance to ensure that changes did actually occur, before updating the row.