Load entities in read-only mode

Relational databases typically benefit from the knowledge, whether a transation will potentially modify and information (so locks are needed), or only read-only queries are executed (so no locks are needed). For similar reason, EclipseLink (and hopefully other JPA implementations, too) know query hints for "ready-only".

Unfortunately when using such vendor-specific hints, this will induce the problem that a portable application must know all these hints for all JPA implementations (or there will be no Performance gain for the unknown ones). This is not smart from the view of an ISV.

Hence I want to propose that the next maintenance release of the JPA specification defines a unique name and value to enable the read-only query mode independently of the actual JPA implementation.

Proposal: A compliant implementation which has a read-only query mode MUST enable this read-only query mode when the "javax.persistence.readonly" with a value of "true" is provided.

Start with the read-only query-mode proposal in this issue, then review linked pull requests #668 and #820 to understand the work already underway. Check whether the proposed standard hint and required behavior are covered; done means the specification has a resolved, agreed definition for portable read-only queries.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.