best practice of querying amout of tree organized data

[senges]

Hi all,
this is a somewhat general question. For me its not that clear how to
handle resultsets of big queries where the resultset can be considered
as a tree structure (like filesystem, list of objects which i can
expand and also can expand subobjects, ...).

There's no problem with trees small in size. I just get the whole
resultset and show it.

But if the query is somewhat big i dont want to get the whole
resultset. I maybe want to load the subobjects as recently as i expand
them (lazy loading). Or i want to load a part of the resultset one
after another (pagination).

I used lazy loading with hibernate but aren't they more generic
patterns to realize kind of lazy loading in big datasets?
How do you build navigation trees of objects on your website? You
always create small GUIObjects or use hibernate for lazy loading?

Changing some ideas about that would be quite cool. Or someone maybe
knows a good source where to look?

Thanks,
Chirs