Hello and thanks for taking the time to read my question.

I wanted to be able to dynamically setup the collection fetch style (select/join) at runtime but I see I can't do that yet. As an alternative I was thinking of using a reasonable Batch Fetching to help some of that problem.

http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/stable/core/reference/en/html/performance.html#performance-fetching-batch

My question is: If I set a default fetch size on the class (in hbm.xml) does it completely bypass the second level cache? For example:

If I have an un-initialized collection but all of its elements exist in the second-level cache, will it execute the batch-fetch anyway on access or is it smart enough to check the second-level cache first AND THEN batch-fetch if it tries to load an object that hasn't been cached yet?

Thanks!