Our adoption of Hibernate is going on to almost 1.5 years now. We are now in the process of replacing an in-house persistence mechanism on another project with Hibernate. We haven't had any real problems thus far and the development team are huge endorsers of the product. Thanks.

Question:

We have geographically disparate EIS database tiers throughout North America and have been using products such as PeerDirect replication for over 4 years to manage our database replication.

Is there anything specific to Hibernate that we should be made aware of when using database replication?

One question that comes to mind is how will Hibernate will behave when the 2nd level cache becomes stale due to replication?

Are there any best practices out there in the field?

Regards,
Roll

Of course you have to be careful whenever another process accesses the same database, especially when using caching. Some hints and tips:

- If possible, do the replication at times where there is no access to the application (pretty clear)
- If you can, clear the cache programmatically after replication.
- If not, use the cache only for non-critical, read-mostly data, and set a reasonable cache-expiery time

In general, keep away from caching often modified, buisness critical classes.