Hibernate and Lazy Initialization
Hibernate object relational mapping offers both lazy and non-lazy modes of object initialization. Non-lazy initialization retrieves an object and all of its related objects at load time. This can result in hundreds if not thousands of select statements when retrieving one entity. The problem is compounded when bi-directional relationships are used, often causing entire databases to be loaded during the initial request. Of course one could tediously examine each object relationship and manually remove those most costly, but in the end, we may be losing the ease of use benefit sought in using the ORM tool.
The obvious solution is to employ the lazy loading mechanism provided by hibernate. This initialization strategy only loads an object's one-to-many and many-to-many relationships when these fields are accessed. The scenario is practically transparent to the developer and a minimum amount of database requests are made, resulting in major performance gains. One drawback to this technique is that lazy loading requires the Hibernate session to remain open while the data object is in use. This causes a major problem when trying to abstract the persistence layer via the Data Access Object pattern. In order to fully abstract the persistence mechanism, all database logic, including opening and closing sessions, must not be performed in the application layer. Most often, this logic is concealed behind the DAO implementation classes which implement interface stubs. The quick and dirty solution is to forget the DAO pattern and include database connection logic in the application layer. This works for small applications but in large systems this can prove to be a major design flaw, hindering application extensibility.
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