Working with stateless session in hibernate and jpa

When doing heavy read-only operations in with the database it can be a good idea to take advantage of using Hibernate's Stateless Session

As it name indicates this session does not keep state of the entities that it retrieves from the database and so it bypasses the L1 and L2 cache

This can have significant performance impact on heavy DBA read operations (since the state of the entities is not bet tracked)

@Component
@Scope("prototype")
public class SomeJpaService {

public static final int SCROLL_STEP = 1000;

     @PersistenceContext
     private EntityManager entityManager;


    
     public void doInStatelessSession(){

       LOGGER.info("ABOUT to perform Heavy read operation on DB");

       StatelessSession statelessSession = entityManager.unwrap(Session.class).getSessionFactory().openStatelessSession();

        try (ScrollableResults r = statelessSession
                .createQuery("SELECT c FROM Order c")
                .setReadOnly(true)
                .setCacheable(false)
                .scroll()) {// create the scrollable results with a try/close resources block

            while (r.scroll(SCROLL_STEP)) {
                 Order o = (Order) r.get(0);
                //perform some operation on object
              
            }
        }      



        LOGGER.info("FINISHED heavy read operation");

        statelessSession.close();
   }


}

There's however a few caveats with this approach :

• Collections cannot be fetched on stateless sessions
• Because of the stateless nature of the session this can only be used on read-only operations