I'm new to hibernate, I built my entity mappings through hibernate and seam but the issue is some of my relationships are one to more than 10,000 rows. I want to be able to only get 50 at a time from these tables. Even when I do a join fetch and set max result list its still loading all of the rows into memory. Is there anyway to do this without having to write a separate query? Can I only return 50 at a time when accessing the Set from the parent entity?

Any input would help.

I don't think when you set the max result all the rows will be loaded into memory, if you see the hibernate sql query it's checking with where condition for rownum.
If i am wrong, please correct me.