Program guide > Access data with client applications > Cache objects and their relationships (EntityManager API)



EntityManager fetch plan support

A FetchPlan is the strategy that the entity manager uses for retrieving associated objects if the application needs to access relationships.


Example

Assume for example that the application has two entities: Department and Employee. The relationship between the Department entity and the Employee entity is a bi-directional one-to-many relationship: One department has many employees, and one employee belongs to only one department. Since most of the time, when Department entity is fetched, its employees are likely to be fetched, the fetch type of this one-to-many relationship is set to be EAGER.

Here is a snippet of the Department class.

    @Entity
public class Department {

    @Id
    private String deptId;

    @Basic
    String deptName;

        @OneToMany(fetch = FetchType.EAGER, mappedBy="department", cascade = {CascadeType.PERSIST})
        public Collection<Employee> employees;

}

In a distributed environment, when an application calls em.find(Department.class, "dept1") to find a Department entity with key "dept1", this find operation will get the Department entity and all its eager-fetched relations. In the case of the preceding snippet, these are all the employees of department "dept1".

Prior to WebSphere eXtreme Scale 6.1.0.5, the retrieval of one Department entity and N Employee entities incurred N+1 client-server trips because the client retrieved one entity for one client-server trip. You can improve performance if you retrieve these N+1 entities in one trip.


Fetch plan

A fetch plan can be used to customize how to fetch eager relationships by customizing the maximum depth of the relationships. The fetch depth overrides eager relations greater than the specified depth to lazy relations. By default, the fetch depth is the maximum fetch depth. This means that eager relationships of all levels that are eager-navigable from the root entity will be fetched. An EAGER relationship is eager-navigable from a root entity if and only if all the relations starting from the root entity to it are configured as eager-fetched.

In the previous example, the Employee entity is eager-navigable from the Department entity because the Department-Employee relationship is configured as eager-fetched.

If the Employee entity has another eager relationship to an Address entity for instance, then the Address entity is also eager-navigable from the Department entity. However, if the Department-Employee relationships were configured as lazy-fetch, then the Address entity is not eager-navigable from the Department entity because the Department-Employee relationship breaks the eager fetch chain.

A FetchPlan object can be retrieved from the EntityManager instance. The application can use the setMaxFetchDepth method to change the maximum fetch depth.

A fetch plan is associated with an EntityManager instance. The fetch plan applies to any fetch operation, more specifically as follows.

The FetchPlan object is mutable. Once changed, the changed value will be applied to the fetch operations executed afterward.

A fetch plan is important for a distributed deployment because it decides whether the eager-fetched relationship entities are retrieved with the root entity in one client-server trip or more than one.

Continuing with the previous example, consider further that the fetch plan has maximum depth set to infinity. In that case, when an application calls em.find(Department.class, "dept1") to find a Department, this find operation will get one Department entity and N employee entities in one client-server trip. However, for a fetch plan with maximum fetch depth set to zero, only the Department object will be retrieved from the server, while the Employee entities are retrieved from the server only when the employees collection of the Department object is accessed.


Different fetch plans

You have several different fetch plans based on the requirements, explained in the following sections.


Impact on a distributed grid

If a relationship is ordered, using either OrderBy annotation or configuration, then it is considered an eager relationship even if it is configured as lazy-fetch.


Performance considerations in a distributed environment

By default, all relationships that are eager-navigable from the root entity will be retrieved in one client-server trip. This can improve performance if all the relationships are going to be used. However, in certain usage scenarios, not all relationships eager-navigable from the root entity are used, so they incur both run-time overhead and bandwidth overhead by retrieving those unused entities.

For such cases, the application can set the maximum fetch depth to a small number to decrease the depth of entities to be retrieved by making all the eager relations after that certain depth lazy. This setting can improve performance.

Proceeding still further with the previous Department-Employee-Address example, by default, all the Address entities associated with employees of the Department "dept1" will be retrieved when em.find(Department.class, "dept1") is called. If the application does not use Address entities, it can set the maximum fetch depth to 1, so the Address entities will not be retrieved with the Department entity.


Parent topic:

Cache objects and their relationships (EntityManager API)


Related concepts

EntityManager in a distributed environment

Interacting with EntityManager

EntityManager interface performance impact

Entity query queues


Related tasks

Entity manager tutorial: Overview

Related reference

Define an entity schema

EntityTransaction interface


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