For the purposes of handling very large collections (and by very large I just mean "likely to throw OutOfMemory exception"), it seems problematic to use Hibernate because normally collection retrieval is done in a block, i.e. List values=session.createQuery("from X").list(), where you monolithically grab all N-million values and then process them.

What I'd prefer to do is to retrieve the values as an iterator so that I grab 1000 or so (or whatever's a reasonable page size) at a time. Apart from writing my own iteration (which seems like it's likely to be re-inventing the wheel) is there a hibernate-native way to handle this?