Hi,

As I understand it, hibernate caches all data. But if there are millions of records in the database, then at some point one server won't be able to handle all of that data in memory. So what to do?

Use an application server like JBoss, to "share the cache"? I was told by someone that I couldn't do this with hibernate.

But to me that doesn't make sense because hibernate is supposed to be part of a lightweight j2ee solution. What is an "enterprise" without an applicatoin server?

Can someone set me straight? How would I use multiple servers to share the hibernate load...?

Thanks

Caching does not mean that all data from the database is loaded. A cache will probalby hold the data you loaded for your application. You can define the size of a cache. See the EHCache configuration for example.
Hibernate will only load some million rows if you do want to access them at the same time. Even then the cache size has its limits. You will probably have to page through your data.

Try out cache and reading large list of data and paging to get some experience with this.

Regards Sebastian

Thanks for the reply. I'm still trying to determine:

How would I use multiple servers to share the hibernate load...? Can hibernate be used in an application server to achieve this?

I think you can use OSCache. It has the feature to add an Multicast Address, on which the Servers can listen.