title: JPA entity graphs and pagination
body: <p>In my current project we have multiple search pages in the system where we fetch a lot of data from the database to be shown in a large table element in the UI. We're using JPA for data access (our provider is Hibernate). The data for most of the pages is gathered from multiple database tables - around 10 in many cases - including some aggregate data from OneToMany relationships (e.g. "number of associated entities of type X"). In order to improve performance, we're using result set pagination with <code>TypedQuery.setFirstResult()</code> and <code>TypedQuery.setMaxResults()</code> to lazy-load additional rows from the database as the user scrolls the table. As the searches are very dynamic, we're using the JPA CriteriaQuery API to build the queries. However, we're currently somewhat suffering from the N+1 SELECT problem. It's pretty bad in some cases actually, as we might be iterating through 3 levels of nested OneToMany relationships, where on each level the data is lazy-loaded. We can't really declare those collections as eager loaded in the entity mappings, as we're only interested in them in some of our pages. I.e. we might fetch data from the same table in several different pages, but we're showing different data from the table and from different associated tables in different pages.</p>
  
  <p>In order to alleviate this, we started experimenting with JPA entity graphs, and they seem to help a lot with the N+1 SELECT problem. However, when you use entity graphs, Hibernate apparently applies the pagination in-memory. I can somewhat understand why it does that, but this behavior negates a lot (if not all) of the benefits of the entity graphs in many cases. When we didn't use entity graphs, we could load data without applying any WHERE restrictions (i.e. considering the whole table as the result set), no matter how many millions of rows the table had, as only a very limited amount of rows were actually fetched due to the pagination. Now that the pagination is done in-memory, Hibernate basically fetches the whole database table (plus all relationships defined in the entity graph), and then applies the pagination in-memory, throwing the rest of the rows away. Not good.</p>
  
  <p>So the question is, <strong>is there an efficient way to apply both pagination and entity graphs with JPA (Hibernate)?</strong> If JPA does not offer a solution to this, Hibernate-specific extensions are also acceptable. If that's not possible either, what are the other alternatives? Using database Views? Views would be a bit cumbersome, as we support several database vendors. Creating all of the necessary views for different vendors would increase development effort quite a bit.</p>
  
  <p>Another idea I've had would be to apply both the entity graphs and pagination as we currently do, and simply not trigger any queries if they would return too many rows. I already need to do COUNT queries to get the lazy-loading of rows to work properly in the UI.</p>