With entity beans marked as Option A transaction commit mode and putting this together with tuned updates (whereby the store is avoided for container-managed persistence entity beans if the container determines that the CMP fields were not modified), read-only transactions can be performed completely in the container, without touching the database. The load is avoided because the entity bean is “ready” in the container (as per Option A), and the store is avoided because the entity CMP fields have not changed (as per tuned updates). Should be fast!