Batch inserts with JPA/EJB3

Question

Does JPA/EJB3 framework provide standard way to do batch insert operation...? We use hibernate for persistence framework, So I can fall back to Hibernate Session and use combination session.save()/session.flush() achieve batch insert. But would like to know if EJB3 have a support for this...

Answer 1

Neither JPA nor Hibernate do provide particular support for batch inserts and the idiom for batch inserts with JPA would be the same as with Hibernate:

EntityManager em = ...;
EntityTransaction tx = em.getTransaction();
tx.begin();

for ( int i=0; i<100000; i++ ) {
    Customer customer = new Customer(.....);
    em.persist(customer);
    if ( i % 20 == 0 ) { //20, same as the JDBC batch size
        //flush a batch of inserts and release memory:
        em.flush();
        em.clear();
    }
}

tx.commit();
session.close();

Using Hibernate's proprietary API in this case doesn't provide any advantage IMO.

References

• JPA 1.0 Specification
  • Section 4.10 "Bulk Update and Delete Operations"
• Hibernate Core reference guide
  • Chapter 13. Batch processing