Hi. This is my first post here. I am evaluating the use of Hibernate Search to optimize an existing Hibernate query that searches a database VIEW, call it MyItemView, over the entity being searched, call it MyItem. In other words, the entity being searched (the view class) is never updated. MyItem is the entity I want to index. But I don't search for objects of MyItem because it is a heavyweight class with a lot of ManyToOne mappings. MyItemView joins the tables needed and presents a flat Java bean.

Is there a solution to this sort of problem? Thanks.

Hi,

Hibernate Search could be just the thing for you :)
At indexing time you can index just whatever properties you need. You can use @indexEmbedded to include properties from associated objects into your Lucene document. In case it is to expensive to load the full object at search time you might even use Hibernate Search projections. Effectively you are storing all the information you need in the Lucene index so that when it comes to data retrieval you can bypass the database access completely. Note though that you won't get managed objects back in this case, but Object arrays. However, implementing your own ResultTransformer will allow you to map your custom bean with just the information you need.

Overall it seems to me that Hibernate Search fulfills your requirements, but I recommend you to start reading the online documentation in order to get full understanding on what Hibernate Search can do and what not.

--Hardy

This didn't help. Perhaps I did not state the problem well enough. The search presently goes against a database VIEW, not the table corresponding to the Hibernate entity I want to search. The VIEW is mapped to a different Hibernate Entity that is read-only. The VIEW mapping class has:

@org.hibernate.annotations.Entity(mutable = false)

Using projections when searching the primary entity wouldn't help, because the ManyToOne fields are from code tables. Those always have to be loaded anyway. The VIEW optimizes this by joining them in a precompiled SQL query, which is one of the benefits of using a VIEW. And Hibernate does not have to join anything to the VIEW object.

From the number of reads of this post, compared to the number of answers, I am concluding that this simply is impossible with Hibernate Search. It can only be used to search for the same Entities that are mapped into Lucene.

I would have to completely reimplement the search and ditch the VIEW approach. That would require a great deal of change to the application. Thus it appears that though Hibernate Search would yield performance gains during search, in this case it would incur significant development cost and change risk.

Thanks.