Dear team,

i would like to know if Hibernate is a good vehicle to do the following. If not, does someone know a better tool for achieving this goal ?

1. Read in XML/flat file and create java objects out of it
- files are usually larger than 500 MB.

2. Use Hibernate to keep these objects in memory and on disk. Persistence is used because we cannot hold such a large amount of data in memory, not because we want to keep the data for a long time

3. Hibernate is supposed to keep necessary objects both in memory and on disk and load needed data from disk into memory. I assume that Hibernate offers intelligent prefetching and caching algorithms.

4. I would like to iterate through the large set of data - using multiple threads - and read the data.

5. Is Hiberate able to use a flat file as a database instead of a relational database ?

If anybody could shed some light on this questions,
i would highly appreciate it.

Best regards
Frank

privat@frank-langel.de

Hibernate = Object Relationnal Mapping, if you don't use a relationnal database, don't use an ORM....

Using a SAX content handler is the best way to process large XML sets, any other method I've found blows memory out regularly. Tie in a persister type method to the content handler if you need it saved to the DB. There is no nice XML to DB mapping tool really, it's best hand-rolled.