Large Collections

[John D'Ausilio]

We're working on an ecommerce site which has a rather large (> 3M) record
products table. We were hoping that the Collection which is returned when an
entity bean's collection field getter is called would be smart .. that the
entity beans would be instantiated as needed vs all instantiated at once.
Alas, it appears that this is not the case. I initially ran out of memory
trying to get the collection until I applied the
ApplicationAdministrator.flushEJBCache hack, but the elapsed time is still
just too large when dealing with that collection.

My question is how are people handling this kind of problem? Should I just
abandon CMP for this stuff and do it in a traditional fashion, perhaps a
temporary table, via JDBC? Maybe cache the handles from the CMP collections
for reuse? Go for a database specific solution?

tia

john d