Working with a second-level cache

In the previous section, you learned about the first-level cache, which is enabled by default and whose scope is limited to a particular session.

Now, the scope of the second-level cache is SessionFactory, and we can use the cached objects across the different sessions that are created using this particular SessionFactory. Hibernate provides the option to either enable or disable the second-level cache.

Hibernate provides a facility to change the cache provider, which means that we can provide any cache provider that supports integration with hibernate. Ehcache is used as the default cache provider by hibernate. Apart from Ehcache, there are some other providers available that support integration with hibernate. They are listed as follows:

• OSCache

• SwarmCache

• JBoss Cache

In this recipe, we will consider integration with Ehcache.

Getting ready

For this recipe to be successful, we need one more JAR file for Ehcache. We can download the Ehcache distribution from the...