I'm fairly new to programming, at least when it comes to anything substantial. I am about to start work on a management software for my employer which draws it's data from, and stores it's data to, an SQL database. I will likely be using JDBC to interact with it.
To try and accurately describe the problem I am going to focus on a very small portion of the program. In the database, there is a table that stores Job records. There are a couple of thousand of them. I want to display all available Jobs (as a text reference from the table) in a scroll-able panel in the program with a search function.
So, my question is... Should I create Job objects from each record in one go and have the program work with the objects to display them, OR should I simply display strings taken directly from the records? The first method would mean that other details of each job are stored in advanced so that when I open a record in the UI the load times should be minimal, however it also sounds like it would take a great deal of resources when it initially populates the panel and generates the objects. The second method would mean issuing a large quantity of queries to the Database, but might avoid the initial resource overhead, but I don't want to put too much strain on the SQL Server because other software in-house relies on it.
Really, I don't know anything about how I should be doing this. But that really is my question. Apologies if I am displaying my ignorance in this post, and thank you in advanced for any help you can offer.
"A couple thousand" is a very small number for modern computers. If you have any sort of logic to perform on these records (they're not all modified solely via stored procedures), you're going to have a much easier time using an object-relational mapping (ORM) tool like Hibernate. Look into the JPA specification, which allows you to create Java classes that represent database objects and then simply annotate them to describe how they're stored in the database. Using an ORM like this system does have some overhead, but it's nearly always worthwhile, since computers are fast and programmers are expensive.
Note: This is a specific example of the rule that you should do things in the clearest and easiest-to-understand way unless you have a very specific reason not to, and in particular that you shouldn't optimize for speed unless you've measured your program's performance and have determined that a specific section of the code is causing problems. Use the abstractions that make the code easy to understand and come back later if you actually have to speed things up.