Is there any way to read values from an entity bean without locking it for

Question :Is there any way to read values from an entity bean without locking it for
the rest of the transaction (e.g. read-only transactions)? We have a keyvalue
map bean which deadlocks during some concurrent reads. Isolation
levels seem to affect the database only, and we need to work within a
transaction. (EJB)
Answer :The only thing that comes to (my) mind is that you could write a 'group
accessor' - a method that returns a single object containing all of your
entity bean's attributes (or all interesting attributes). This method could
then be placed in a 'Requires New' transaction. This way, the current
transaction would be suspended for the duration of the call to the entity
bean and the entity bean's fetch/operate/commit cycle will be in a separate
transaction and any locks should be released immediately. Depending on
the granularity of what you need to pull out of the map, the group accessor
might be overkill.