How to disable updates for a field of an Entity EJB?

If you need to select which columns need update when executing a CMP statement you can use the “updatable” attribute on the @Column annotation.
Setting “updatable” = false will assume that the column is not always included in the SQL update statement.

Here is an example:

import javax.persistence.Column;
import javax.persistence.Entity;
import javax.persistence.GeneratedValue;
import javax.persistence.GenerationType;
import javax.persistence.Id;
import javax.persistence.SequenceGenerator;

@Entity
public class Model {

    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.SEQUENCE, generator = "model_generator")
    @SequenceGenerator(name = "model_generator", sequenceName = "model_seq")
    @Column
    private Long id;

    @Column
    private String name;

    @Column(updatable = false)
    private String avatar;

}

Important notice: as you can read from the javadoc of Hibernate 5.4 the updatable attribute is marked as optional:

(Optional) Whether the column is included in SQL UPDATE statements generated by the persistence provider.

As a matter of fact, if you issue an update statement with HQL or using CriteriaUpdate, against a field annotated with @Column(updatable = false) , your update statement will be executed .

The @Column(updatable = false) will skip the field update if you are using either Hibernate’s update or JPA’s merge method.