Why does JPA have a @Transient annotation?

Java's transient keyword is used to denote that a field is not to be serialized, whereas JPA's @Transient annotation is used to indicate that a field is not to be persisted in the database, i.e. their semantics are different.

Because they have different meanings. The @Transient annotation tells the JPA provider to not persist any (non-transient) attribute. The other tells the serialization framework to not serialize an attribute. You might want to have a @Transient property and still serialize it.

As others have said, @Transient is used to mark fields which shouldn't be persisted. Consider this short example:

public enum Gender { MALE, FEMALE, UNKNOWN }

@Entity
public Person {
    private Gender g;
    private long id;

    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy=GenerationType.AUTO)
    public long getId() { return id; }
    public void setId(long id) { this.id = id; }

    public Gender getGender() { return g; }    
    public void setGender(Gender g) { this.g = g; }

    @Transient
    public boolean isMale() {
        return Gender.MALE.equals(g);
    }

    @Transient
    public boolean isFemale() {
        return Gender.FEMALE.equals(g);
    }
}

When this class is fed to the JPA, it persists the gender and id but doesn't try to persist the helper boolean methods - without @Transient the underlying system would complain that the Entity class Person is missing setMale() and setFemale() methods and thus wouldn't persist Person at all.

In laymen's terms, if you use the @Transient annotation on an attribute of an entity: this attribute will be singled out and will not be saved to the database. The rest of the attributes of the object within the entity will still be saved.

Im saving the Object to the database using the jpa repository built in save method as so:

userRoleJoinRepository.save(user2);

For Kotlin developers, remember the Java transient keyword becomes the built-in Kotlin @Transient annotation. Therefore, make sure you have the JPA import if you're using JPA @Transient in your entity:

import javax.persistence.Transient