Hibernate loading all entities utilizing 1st or 2nd level cache

Question

We have an entire table of entities that we need to load during a hibernate session and the only way I know to load all entities is through an HQL query:

public <T> List<T> getAllEntities(final Class<T> entityClass) {
    if (null == entityClass)
        throw new IllegalArgumentException("entityClass can't be null");

    List<T> list = castResultList(createQuery(
            "select e from " + entityClass.getSimpleName() + " e ").list());


    return list;
}

We use EHcache for 2nd level caching.

The problem is this gets called 100's of times in a given transaction session and takes up a considerable portion of the total time. Is there any way to load all entities of a given type (load an entire table) and still benefit from 1st level session cache or 2nd level ehcache.

We've been told to stay away from query caching because of their potential performance penalties relative to their gains. * Hibernate Query Cache considered harmful

Although we're doing performance profiling right now so it might be time to try turning on query cache.

Answer 1

L1 and L2 cache can't help you much with the problem of "get an entire table."

The L1 cache is ill-equipped because if someone else inserted something, it's not there. (You may "know" that no one else would ever do so within the business rules of the system, but the Hibernate Session doesn't.) Hence you have to go look in the DB to be sure.

With the L2 cache, things may have been expired or flushed since the last time anybody put the table in there. This can be at the mercy of the cache provider or even done totally externally, maybe through a MBean. So Hibernate can't really know at any given time if what's in the cache for that type represents the entire contents of the table. Again, you have to look in the DB to be sure.

Since you have special knowledge about this Entity (new ones are never created) that there isn't a practical way to impart on the L1 or L2 caches, you need to either use the tool provided by Hibernate for when you have special business-rules-level knowledge about a result set, query cache, or cache the info yourself.

--

If you really really want it in the L2 cache, you could in theory make all entities in the table members of a collection on some other bogus entity, then enable caching the collection and manage it secretly in the DAO. I don't think it could possibly be worth having that kind of bizarreness in your code though :)

Answer 2

We ended up solving this by storing in memory the primary keys to all the entities in the table we needed to load (because they're template data and no new templates are added/removed).

Then we could use this list of primary keys to look up each entity and utilize Hibernates 1st and 2nd level cache.