I have implemented my own usertype but what is concerning to me is that after doing something with the data in the user type (i.e. lets say I save foo to the database but when I read it back I want to add bar so the string becomes foobar) hibernate detects a change in the entity and persists that change, even though I don't want that change. I had assumed that the call to the equals() method I have implemented (which is returning true for these objects) would stop the persist from happening but that is not the case. Is there some way to stop hibernate from tryign to do an update in this case?