Hi the list, I realize I often post when I have a question or when something goes wrong. I decided to post because I'm happy with OpenJPA and everything is fine.
I'd like to share I'm really happy with fetch plan that we use heavily. As a consequence, we are no more using lazy loading at all. Instead, we're defining what we need using fetch plan and get only what we need. We didn't have time to test under heavy load or with a heavy database but one of our customer did compare the new system we made to previous system and feel it is really quicker. Nothing prove it is due exclusively to fetch plan but it is still positive. Let me try to quickly explain the benefit of fetch plan. Say we have to cook that French cake "Charlotte aux fraises". Using lazy loading, here what's happen : 1. OK, I need 10 strawberry, let's run to the shop and comeback quickly. 2. read the cook book further : I also need those special element "biscuit a la cuilliere", OK, let's go to the shop 3. read next step ... Guess what, it is slow and I get bored to go to that shop every time ! Now, let's use fetch plan : 1. Read the cook book for "Charlotte aux fraises". Ok, I need 10 strawberry and some "biscuit a la cuilliere". 2. Go to the shop and buy everything at once, following a list I've written. 3. Cook that cake without going to the shop anymore. I just can't understand why fetch plan approach is not the default way. ... and with fetch plan too I could add cache and this could speed up things. For lazy loading, cache is not an answer, it is a way to hide problems or more precisely, to hide my ignorance about what exact data I need as a Java developer. What's the point of doing OO model in UML if that information is ignored because of lazy loading ? The danger, and I met that situation often on customer cases, is to loose the control. Sometimes, no one in the dev team know exactly what data is used because of lazy loading. In some hard case, one have to reverse engineer by spying SQL to recover information of what part of the app need what data. Also, concurrency become harder to solve because data dependencies are not written anywhere. So, lazy loading in some particular cases, why not, but default approach should be using fetch plan. On the other hand, we were not in the case of very very complex request or "action" in the database. Even in such cases, I'm not sure lazy loading would helps. Conclusion : thanks OpenJPA, you're the only one I know with such powerful feature. I stop using Hibernate because fetch plan was missing (and the code was easy to migrate). JBB. --- The data I need and only the data I need.
