Hi,

Depending on the speed of your hardware, your OS, and your JVM, you appear to be in the normal ballpark for speed with MySQL through the MM driver.

For greatest performance you'll probably want to reduce the number of queries for each high-level operation (if you only do 1, then you're already in good shape). And I suspect that grouping your data into fewer but larger strings would help if you can do that. Welcome to object database design.

Architecturally, using constructors and reflection has some advantages over saving the internal representations of objects: your object persistence code makes use of the objects' established APIs and doesn't go around them like object serialization does. When I used reflection for a project I stored things like Method objects in my own data structures instead of looking them up repeatedly and I believe that helped the speed.

You may just have to look at the performance of the different parts of your system and see where the time is going. By the way, the MM driver does its I/O before giving you the first record, so that may help you isolate the time actually spent talking to the database.