Understanding Caching in Hibernate

Hibernate provides powerful caching mechanisms which can help increasing performance and scalability of your application. However besides the benefits there are also pitfalls, which can only be avoided if one understands the inner workings of Hibernate and the dynamics of it's caching behavior.
Dynatrace has a three part series on Hibernate caching mechanisms on their blog.

• Part One : The Session Cache


• Part Two : The Query Cache


• Part Three : The Second Level Cache