Hi, I am using Hibernate to persist data for a course registration application. I am having to query like 5 different tables to gather info about each course. For instance, there is a "COURSE" table and then a "COURSE SPECIAL CODE" table. Here is my design question. Since I only need ONE particular field from the "COURSE SPECIAL CODE" table, should I add an identifier for the special code as well as methods to the COURSE class file to query the code table and populate the identifier, or should I be doing this in the course registration application?

I am trying to maximize performance but I don't want to violate any sort of design criteria of Hibernate.

Help is greatly appreciated.

With the beuaty of caching, Hibernate should be able to handle a lot of this for you. Check the forums for about caching.

don't forget that cache doesn't make "everything" more performant, think twice before using it, think about scalability BEFORE and use cache only for objects you know they will be hit many times...

for your problem, i suggest you to take a look at formula, if you need to read a column on a joined table. But this is only for read (no update).