Read-mostly pattern in Toplink?

Question

Hello:
I am using Toplink 10g (9.0.4) with Weblogic 8.1, and am using EJB 2.0 CMP entity beans. For performance reasons, I have a Read-Only bean and a Read-Write bean, both using the same RDBMS tables for persistence. I would like to implement a 'Read-mostly' pattern, where I would use the Read-Only bean for reads and the Read-Write bean for writes (duh!). If I used Weblogic's CMP, I can set the Read-Write EJB to 'invalidate' it's Read-Only counterpart whenever any changes to its persistent field are saved to the database - this is done by an entry in the weblogic-ejb-jar.xml descriptor. This forces the data for the Read-only bean to be reread from the database on the next call. Since Toplink is taking care of CMP, putting this entry in my weblogic-ejb-jar.xml file obviously does nothing. Is there any way to implement this pattern using TopLink? Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

First, thanks for the reply.
I do realize I don't explicitly need to have two beans. Let me fill in the gaps a bit:
I'm trying to wring out every ounce of performance from my application. Using a ReadOnly Entity bean allows me to better control what TopLink registers when I enter a transaction. I've noticed that even for straight reads, TopLink registers every object that the read/write entity bean 'touches' during a method call, and then checks all of these objects to see if they changed before committing the transaction. Needless to say, this is unnecessary, and significantly slows down the application. When I use a ReadOnly entity bean, this object registration doesn't happen.
So, to be more specific, is there any way I can set a method on a Read/write entity bean to 'ReadOnly', so it doesn't unnecessarily register all the objects? I cannot figure out a way to do this, so I've used a ReadOnly bean in combination with a ReadWrite bean to get around this performance bottleneck.
Thanks again for your time.
- Robert Benkovitz