Brett, I found something interesting in the hibernate docs:
Pg 416 of hibernate pdf explains how batch processing works in
hibernate – it’s automatic! How cool!
Flushing the persistence context
The Hibernate Session implements write-behind. Changes to persistent
objects
made in the scope of a persistence context aren’t immediately
propagated to the
database. This allows Hibernate to coalesce many changes into a
minimal number
of database requests, helping minimize the impact of network latency.
Another
excellent side-effect of executing DML as late as possible, toward the
end of the
transaction, is shorter lock durations inside the database.
For example, if a single property of an object is changed twice in the
same
persistence context, Hibernate needs to execute only one SQL UPDATE.
Another
example of the usefulness of write-behind is that Hibernate is able to
take
advantage of the JDBC batch API when executing multiple UPDATE,
INSERT, or
DELETE statements.
