I have a table with about 1500 records - and a service that needs to list them all.
However, this is very memory intensive since the objects are quite large - they contain a large chunk of XML in one of the columns.

What I want to do is get the number of records in the table without retrieving the list of records.
I will keep a record of the number of records in my application and only retrieve the records if new records are added.

Is it possible to get the number of records without having to bring back the records?

I wouldnt think this is hibernate specific but rather JPQL question:

SELECT COUNT(a) FROM TableName t