Jim Thomas

Make sure you have the latest JDBC drivers from Oracle. You can download them for free. Have you considered using a CLOB datatype instead?

The garbage collection implementation for JDK1.2 has been touted as a vast improvement over JDK1.1 Its supposed to be even better with JavaSoft's HotSpot VM.
The only problem I have encountered has been when garbage collection is invoked on memory that has been swapped to disk. It can be very slow. I would recommend that you make sure mission critical apps (especially J2EE application servers) are never subject to being swapped to disk.

I would recommend downloading the J2EE blueprint document from JavaSoft. The url is: http://www.javasoft.com/j2ee/download.html

Are you creating an InitialContext before doing a JNDI lookup on the home interface of your EJB.
Here is an example for WebLogic:
Context ctx = null;
Hashtable ht = new Hashtable();
ht.put(Context.INITIAL_CONTEXT_FACTORY,
"weblogic.jndi.WLInitialContextFactory");
ht.put(Context.PROVIDER_URL,
"t3://localhost:7001");
try {
ctx = new InitialContext(ht);
// Use the context in your program
}
catch (NamingException e) {
// a failure occurred
}
finally {
try {ctx.close();}
catch (Exception e) {
// a failure occurred
}
}

The short answer is no.
Entity Bean class attributes can only be persisted to a database if you provide the mapping information to the EJB container. You do this via the deployment descriptor for container managed persistence.
In regard to passivation, it relates to object serialization, but the mechanism is not specified in the EJB spec. In short, if you don't want certain attribute values retained during passivation, mark them with the 'transient' keyword.
[This message has been edited by Jim Thomas (edited September 21, 2000).]