I have a table with limited number of rows (say 50) in my application that will be heavily used (read only) by the entire application. All data is versioned. Every time I read a row, the row is locked and will be released only when the transaction is committed. But most of the time, the records in this table are read for display purposes only. There could be other things that happen in the same tranaction that needs to be committed after some processing. But I dont want the other transactions to wait on the lock on this display-only record. How do I accomplish this?

put them on 2nd level cache

read only don't request transaction
- it is bad assumptions in hibernate that read only query have to in transaction

regards

This has been debunked in another thread. "Read operations don't require transaction demarcation if the database management system uses a multi-version concurrency model." In other words, always use transaction demarcation.

There is yet another thread.In other words, You havn't to use transaction for read only operations if your database have good MVC model

regards

You know, it would be better if you don't tell people to break their applications for no apparent reason :)

yes, I know
It is simple ; if You have oracle you can do query without transaction
(it isn't important if you have autocommit off or on)
If You have postgresql you have to do query in transaction
for another databases, I don't know

regards

No no, please don't do that. It's simple: You use Hibernate. It gives you database independence. Use transaction demarcation.

Christian,
You are headstrong.
Except this, it isn't important for bshaw's question - problem is bshaw's database and he have to use transaction, probably
database with good transaction managment have rule - reader stop never writer and writer stop never reader - it is true in transaction and without
transaction
Bshaw,
If read lock another transaction then you change database

regards