Question

I have a database column which contains varchar data type. I would like to store this data in an arraylist for comparison with another list. I can think of two ways to do this. One is get the data and assign it to a String and store it in the arraylist. The second method would be to have a POJO , which would have a getter and setter method for this variable and store it in the POJO which in turn is stored in an arraylist. When I have to compare it against another variable, I have to either do a String comparison OR get it out of a POJOs getter method and then compare. While I feel that using the String reduces a lot of code, I would like to know if using one(String) over the other(POJO) has any memory implication. I usually need to compare around 1000 objects. So which one would consume less memory….in other words which one would be much faster to run….better performance. I need to use JAVA 1.4.

Answer 1

In Java, the science is, when you create an object, it takes part of heap, in pojo case it will be heap space for pojo and heap space for String (which is memory) and time complexity also (getter/setter). I would prefer just Strings.