Companies such as yahoo do this, it's a very scalable design for web apps where you frequently read more than you write thus having slave databases you read from to generate reports and one master database you write to is very beneficial. (Sorry for the runon : )

I could see the benefit of configuring hibernate such that you have one jdbc connection be in fact 2 jdbc connections, 1 for reading, the other for writing. So you could query an object and it comes from the read jdbc connection. Then when you write it out it goes to the write jdbc connection.

This is actually how yahoo does it via their perl DBI wrapper.

Thoughts?

You can make it "transparent" for hibernte, use custom connection provider or wrapp jdbc driver.