# TransientObjectException : who's holding the reference
**URL:** https://discourse.hibernate.org/t/transientobjectexception-whos-holding-the-reference/11986
**Category:** Hibernate ORM
**Created:** [November 21, 2025, 10:09pm UTC](https://discourse.hibernate.org/t/transientobjectexception-whos-holding-the-reference/11986 "2025-11-21T22:09:21Z")
**Posts on this page:** 2
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@DIrkOnTilt](https://discourse.hibernate.org/u/DIrkOnTilt)
#### Post date: [November 21, 2025, 10:09pm UTC](https://discourse.hibernate.org/t/transientobjectexception-whos-holding-the-reference/11986/1 "2025-11-21T22:09:21Z")
I’m getting this TransientObjectException exception when flushing after deleting an entity. I think this is new since I upgrade Hibernate to 6.x
How do I know which entity is still holding a reference to said entity? The exception message only states the referenced entity but not the referencing one.
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### Author:  [@beikov](https://discourse.hibernate.org/u/beikov)
#### Post date: [November 24, 2025, 9:17am UTC](https://discourse.hibernate.org/t/transientobjectexception-whos-holding-the-reference/11986/2 "2025-11-24T09:17:57Z")
You can create an improvement Jira issue for your particular problem. It seems like we usually have a special subclass `TransientPropertyValueException` for telling more details, but maybe we didn’t make use of it in a particular scenario. For now, you’d have to debug to the point where the exception is created and figure this out through the stack frames.