We haven't had this issue recently so I was wondering if anything has change in 4 that would contribute to it.

We populate some audit columns by trigger upon insert. and in previous versions of hibernate 3.6.10 and ehcache I didn't notice this behavior but we've recently updated to hibernate 4 and ehcache 2.4.3 and what I'm seeing is that ehcache is returning a different value for the audit column that would be present in the database thru the trigger. It seems in the past that ehcache would have had the correct value? Is this a hibernate or ehcache issue?

is there anyway hibernate or ehcache would have had the values previously reliably but no longer thinks they are now null?

Is there anything about old version's of hibernate that would have cause it to refresh the cache after a write and that it no longer does so?