In the documentation (https://gorm.grails.org/latest/hibernate/manual/index.html#_configuration_reference), `grails.gorm.flushMode` has default value `AUTO` but default value for flushMode was changed to `COMMIT` in GORM 6.1: https://gorm.grails.org/6.1.0/hibernate/manual/index.html#_flush_mode_now_commit_by_default The GORM code does have default flushMode set to `COMMIT`, so the documentation is wrong: https://github.com/grails/gorm-hibernate5/blob/7.2.x/grails-datastore-gorm-hibernate5/src/main/groovy/org/grails/orm/hibernate/AbstractHibernateDatastore.java#L132