Introduction Hibernate runs the automatic dirty checking mechanism during flush-time, and any managed entity state change is translated into an UPDATE SQL statement. The default dirty checking mechanism uses Java reflection and goes through every property of every managed entity. If the Persistence Context has few entities, this process might go unnoticed, but, if we’re dealing with many entities or the entities have many properties (e.g. a legacy database Domain Model mapping), then the reflection-based dirty checking might have an associated performance impact.