I simply need to read each row in a table in my MySQL database using Hibernate and write a file based on it. But there are 90 million rows and they are pretty big. So it seemed like the following would be appropriate:

ScrollableResults results = session.createQuery("SELECT person FROM Person person")
            .setReadOnly(true).setCacheable(false).scroll(ScrollMode.FORWARD_ONLY);
while (results.next())
    storeInFile(results.get()[0]);

The problem is the above will try and load all 90 million rows into RAM before moving on to the while loop... and that will kill my memory with OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space exceptions :(.

So I guess ScrollableResults isn't what I was looking for? What is the proper way to handle this? I don't mind if this while loop takes days (well I'd love it to not).

I guess the only other way to handle this is to use setFirstResult and setMaxResults to iterate through the results and just use regular Hibernate results instead of ScrollableResults. That feels like it will be inefficient though and will start taking a ridiculously long time when I'm calling setFirstResult on the 89 millionth row...

UPDATE: setFirstResult/setMaxResults doesn't work, it turns out to take an unusably long time to get to the offsets like I feared. There must be a solution here! Isn't this a pretty standard procedure?? I'm willing to forgo Hibernate and use JDBC or whatever it takes.

UPDATE 2: the solution I've come up with which works ok, not great, is basically of the form:

select * from person where id > <offset> and <other_conditions> limit 1

Since I have other conditions, even all in an index, it's still not as fast as I'd like it to be... so still open for other suggestions..