caching readonly data for java application

I have a database which has around 150K records of data with a primary key on the table. The data size for each record will take less than 1kB. The processing time for constructing a POJO from the DB record takes about 1-2 secs(there is some business logic that takes too much time). This is read-only data. Hence I'm planning to implement caching the data. What I'm thinking to do is. Load the data in subsets(200 records each time) and create a thread that'll construct the POJOs and keep them in a hashtable. While the cache is being loaded(when I start the application) the User will see a wait sign. For storing the data in HashTable is an issue I'll actually store the processed data in to another DB table(marshall the POJO to xml). I use a third party API to load the data from database. Once I load a record I'll have load the data I'll have to load associations for the loaded data and then associations for the association found at the top level. It's like loading a family tree.

1. I can't use Hibernate or any ORM framework as I'm using a third party API to load the data which is shipped with the database it self(it's a product). More over I don't think loading data once is not a big issue.
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2. If there is a possibility to fine tune the business logic I wouldn't have asked this question here.

Caching the data on demand is an option, but I'm trying to see if I can do anything better.

Suggest me if there is a better idea that you are aware of. Thank you./

Suggest me if there is a better idea that you are aware of.

Yes, fix the business logic so that it doesn't take 1 to 2 seconds per record. That's a ridiculously long time.

Before you do that, profile your application to make sure that it is really the business logic that is causing the slow record loading, and not something else. (For example, it could be a pathological data structure, or a database issue.)

Once you've fixed the root cause of the slow record loading, it is still a good idea to cache the read-only records, but you probably don't need to preload the cache. Instead, just load the records on demand.

It sounds like you are reinventing the wheel. I'd be looking to use hibernate. Apart from simplifying the code to access the database, hibernate has built-in caching and lazy loading of data so it only creates objects as you request them. Ergo, a lot of what you describe above is already in place and you can concentrate on sorting out your business logic. I suspect that once you solve the business logic performance issue, there will be no need to do such as complicated caching system and hibernate defaults will be sufficient.

As maximdim said in a comment, preloading the whole thing will take a lot of time. If your system is not very strange, the user won't need all data at once. Just cache on demand instead. I would also recommend using an established caching solution, such as EHCache, which has persistence via DiskStore -- the only issue is that whatever you cache in this case has to be Serializable. Since you can marshall it as XML, I'm betting you can serialize it too, which should be faster.

In a past project, we had to query a very busy, very sluggish service running in an off-site mainframe in order to assemble one of the entities. Average response times from our app were dominated by this query. Since the data we retrieved was mostly read-only caching with EHCache solved our problems.

jdbm has a nice, persistent map implementation (http://code.google.com/p/jdbm2/) - that may help you do local caching - it would certainly be a lot faster than serializing your POJOs to XML and writing them back into a SQL database.

If your data is truly read-only, then I'd think that the best solution would be to treat the source database as an input queue that feeds your app database. Create a background process (heck, a service would be better), and have it monitor the source database and keep your app database synced.