Handling large records in a Java EE application

Question

There is a table phonenumbers with two columns: id, and number. There are about half a million entries in the table. Database is MySQL.

The requirement is to develop a simple Java EE application, connected to that database, that allows a user to download all numbervalues in comma separated style by following a specific URL.

If we get all the values in a huge String array and then concatenate them (with comma in between all the values) in a String and then send it down to the user, does it sound a proper solution?

The application is not public and will be used by a limited no. of people.

Answer 1

Your best bet is to not store the data in Java's memory in any way, but just write the obtained data to the response immediately as the data comes in. You also need to configure the MySQL JDBC driver to serve the resultset row-by-row by Statement#setFetchSize() as per the MySQL JDBC driver documentation, otherwise it will cache the whole thing in memory.

Assuming you're familiar with Servlets, here's a kickoff example which takes that all into account:

protected void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException {
    response.setContentType("text/plain");
    response.setHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment;filename=numbers.txt"); // Force download popup.

    Connection connection = null;
    Statement statement = null;
    ResultSet resultSet = null;
    Writer writer = response.getWriter();

    try {
        connection = database.getConnection();
        statement = connection.createStatement(ResultSet.TYPE_FORWARD_ONLY, ResultSet.CONCUR_READ_ONLY);
        statement.setFetchSize(Integer.MIN_VALUE);
        resultSet = statement.executeQuery("SELECT number FROM phonenumbers");

        while (resultSet.next()) {
            writer.write(resultSet.getString("number"));
            if (!resultSet.isLast()) {
                writer.write(",");
            }
        }
    } catch (SQLException e) {
        throw new ServletException("Query failed!", e);
    } finally { 
        if (resultSet != null) try { resultSet.close; } catch (SQLException logOrIgnore) {}
        if (statement != null) try { statement.close; } catch (SQLException logOrIgnore) {}
        if (connection != null) try { connection.close; } catch (SQLException logOrIgnore) {}
    }
}