From UrbanCode website: 
-- http://www.urbancode.com/projects/ejbbenchmark/idioms.jsp

"The Coarse Grained Entity Bean idiom makes a simple but profound optimization to the Fine Grained Entity Bean idiom. Rather than accessing each attribute individually, the Coarse Grained Entity Bean idiom allows the client application to access all the attributes of an instance at once. This is accomplished with the use of a state object. The entity bean has a single accessor method called getState() that returns an instance of the state object populated with the values of the instance attributes. This idiom allows the client application to incur the overhead of making a call to an EJB method only once and yet obtain the values for all attributes of the instance. 
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See Also 
* UrbanCode
* EjbBenchmark
* EjbIdioms