Are there any articles out there describing how Hibernate does Caching? Or are there different parameters to turn caching on/off.

I am trying to understand how/when Hibernate knows when to go back to the database for reads versus how it knows when it can just return cached information.

In my example, I always see it issuing the select statements.

For example some app servers provide a flag to set isDBShareable for some of the persistent objects. That way it knows if the object was not changed in the current JVM, then it does not have to re-read the database. Obviously this would not work for clustering, etc... but this was just an example.

Thanks
Bill