Hello,

In an application, some related data in around a score of tables are mostly static, and remain so for almost (for this discussion, lets skip the word almost) the life of the application.
I am planning to load this tabular data as objects at application initialization (or, on demand). These objects act as the cache for the data in these tables to the rest of the application objects.

How good is the idea of using Hibernate to load these objects from an RDBMS?

Is it overkill?

Is this not what Hibernate is built and meant to do?

Would I be better off writing a custom built cache loader?

I would appreciate all your views on this.

Thanks,
Balaji

Are your data used in other queries (not only in init time) ?
If yes, you can use Hibernate and JVM level caching system. Those objects won't be loaded several times.

Does your data implements complex relationship between them ?
It's easier to map it once and let Hibernate deals with loading

Do you use Hiberate in other part of your app ?

Do you (or one of your team) have experience with Hibernate ?

Do you want to give it a try ?

If you answered yes to one of those questions, let's roll.

Yes, they will be used elsewhere too. I've made a note to get to know more about JVM caching in Hibernate.


Nothing too complex.. .


No..


No..


Yes.. sure.



Thank you for your comments.. does your opinion change based on the two "No"s above?

-Balaji

I'm not very objective, this is an Hibernate forum ;-)
My 1st question meant, do you think your cached object will be involved in other JDBC requests. If so, implments your requests with Hibernate, and you will benefit from your previous mapping.

This is a good start to make your home maid tutorial, so try it. If your application needs more RDBMS request, improve your mapping and use hibernate in a more complex way.

Productivity speaking, Hibernate isn't a good bet for what you described.

It's up to you.

Thanks..

I have already built some code as a proof of concept.. I'll build on this and use it as the cache.
When Hibernate gets wider accpetance at our organization, I'll expand the usage of Hibernate in our application.

-Balaji