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Hibernate version: 3.0

Mapping documents: none yet

Code between sessionFactory.openSession() and session.close(): none

Full stack trace of any exception that occurs: n/a

Name and version of the database you are using: many

The generated SQL (show_sql=true): none

Debug level Hibernate log excerpt: none

I see many threads about retrieving large collections, but none seem applicable to my needs. I need to be able to iterate through a very large set of objects and operate on them. Performance is not a huge driver in this issue. All my reading about lazy loading seems to reference associations (like the wiki or Hibernate In Action), but the associations are not relevant in this case - I just don't want to load 200,000 objects at once.

I need to either:
(1) lazy-load the objects themselves, but lazy loading doesn't seem to apply here or
(2) do something more complex like generically retrieve just the ids and then iterate through the id object collection and load the objects one at a time, but I don't see how to do that at runtime. I was hoping metadata would help, but I didn't see how.

Any suggestions? This has to be very generic. I can't specify something in the mappings or hard-code any SQL or HQL. Any suggestions?

This sounds similar to what you might want to do in a webapp if you were only showing 1 page of results at a time.

The reference docs give examples for doing pagination and if your JDBC driver supports scrollable ResultSets, you can use query.scroll() to retrieve the data in a more usable manner.

That is a great point, and one I forgot to address in my original question. I was looking at using setFirstResult and setMaxResults, but I am terrified that the order from the database is not guaranteed, and that iterating though the list this way might leave some objects un-retrieved and other doubly-retrieved. Is this a possibility?