The problem in question is how such queries are treated with respect to caching. This http://forum.hibernate.org/viewtopic.php?t=947137 topic makes me think that hibernate detects "nice" queries to mapped tables and therefore caching is possible for them. However, concerning queries that for example involve columns from mapped and not mapped tables, the possibility for caching is not so clear. Could you please share some rules about hibernate caching strategy for this case if any?