Hibernate version: 2.1.6

When I select * from the table with 9700 records, there is a huge amount of memory taken up - 40MB. (Infact I am impressed that hibernate does all this in 2.4 seconds!) Each record can have a 'comment' field which is varchar(2000), although there is often very little in the field. I see in the .hbm that the field is defined as a java.lang.String, length 2000. What does hibernate do - does it always allocate a length of 2000 in a StringBuffer or something? Does it need to know this length for efficiency of internal processing (?) because you don't normally specify the length of Strings...

TIA

The length attribute is only used for generating SQL for automatic schema generation. It is not used to allocate any StringBuffers. - You can always look at the code if you want to know such things, this is open source you know ;)

That is true, but I do not have the time to spare to go through hibernate source code (that's one big reason for why I'm using hibernate ;-) ) - and I don't know if this would take minutes or hours. Probably hours for me, heh heh.
I do sympathise - I also contribute to open source :)