Java Persistence with Hibernate

13.3. Caching fundamentals

A major justification for our claim that applications using an object/relational persistence layer are expected to outperform applications built using direct JDBC is the potential for caching. Although we'll argue passionately that most applications should be designed so that it's possible to achieve acceptable performance without the use of a cache, there is no doubt that for some kinds of applications, especially read-mostly applications or applications that keep significant metadata in the database, caching can have an enormous impact on performance. Furthermore, scaling a highly concurrent application to thousands of online transactions usually requires some caching to reduce the load on the database server(s). ...