Is there a way to make the loading of the mappings occur as needed? We have an application that can run both 2 tier (fat client) and 3 tier. We are hitting 50 table mappings and the 2 tier start up time is already getting to slow and we will approach 350 table mappings when we are complete.

Thanks,
John

No, there is no way to lazy load mappings. You could use different config files to map only the needed classes.

(Note that there are Very Good Reasons why this is not possible.)

Try to load mappings in separate thread during application startup. Hope this will reduce the startup time.

While I have not tried it, but this is a major concern for me as I am going to use Hibernate in a big project.