I am currently using Spring, Hibernate and JUnit and EhCache. I am trying to do the following:

1) Hibernate Session 1: select X from test where id = 1 //X = 100
2) JDBC Session: update test set x=25 where id =1
3) Hibernate Session 1: select X from test where id = 1 //X IS STILL 100?

How can i get hibernate to pick up my change once i change the DB on the back-end.

ps. I am trying to test caching here and want to update the database, and then want to hit cache.removeAll() and the new values x=25 to be picked up. Any clue how i can do this?

every session has a first-level cache, so once an object gets loaded from the DB, it is in the cache and is returned if you query for that again.
you have to call session.evict(yourObject) to detach this object from the session or session.clear() to detach all managed objects from the session.