I have DAO's created for all my entities in java.

I am doing batch insert of around 10,000 records (cats).

I'm flushing the session every 50 records.

While the batch inserting is happening I want to be able to do a select all cats in the cats table so I can see progress, or at the very least I get no records returned.

At the moment though, when I do page refresh of the view all cats page (the query is essentially 'select catName from cats') the page hangs waiting for the batch insert to complete before it reads the records.

Is this normal expected behavior or is there something I can do that will allow my select to work during the batch insert process?

Regards

This is the normal behaviour.

Even if you do session.flush during the save .It will not show your results.
Flush will write all the chanegs after the save transaction is completed.