I hope I am not taking the following quote out of context:

When an object is created, it issues a select for the whole table (or possible several smaller chunks and accumulates) so that it has its data available for immediate read access

Selecting an entire table into memory becomes a real problem when you're dealing with large tables. Also, selecting the table into memory does not lock it. One important thing to remember about some databases (Oracle for one) is that the DB makes every effort to keep frequently accessed blocks of data in memory so that you don't have to do a physical read/write when doing selects, inserts, updates, deletes. This explains (in part) why Oracle soaks up so much memory and CPU.

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I like chicken.