I have a many-to-one relationship from class A to B; I've set lazy=false on that relationship in order to ensure that my loaded instances of A get 'real' (non-proxy) references to B.

I've also configured B so that it is cached (in the second level cache) and all of my queries for B are marked as cacheable the query cache.

From inspecting the Hibernate debug, it would appear that Hibernate only uses the session cache to resolve instances of B when loading an instance of A. It never uses the second level cache, and (because presumably I don't have cacheable control over the query submitted by Hibernate to eagerly fetch the B referenced by an A) it never uses the query cache either.

Is that a correct assumption i.e. eagerly-fetched many-to-one references can never be resolved from the query or 2nd-level cache? Is there a way to force eager fetching to use the 2nd-level cache?

Thanks in advance,

Alan

No. Eager means exactly that: proactively go to the database, getting as much as you need, not caring about how much effort that is.

If you want to get things from the cache sometimes, and fetch them eagerly other times, leave the mapping's lazy setting at its default, and override it on the appropriate queries.