In what form does Hibernate put objects into 2nd level caches? How fine-grained is 2nd level caching? Does hibernate manages 2nd level cache'ing on object basis or field basis? I'm asking because I need to know whether 2nd level caching solutions have a way of replicating in cluster only field level changes instead of replicating whole object. Terracotta video-seminars state that Hibernate caches serialized representation of object in 2nd-level-cache, but I'm not 100% sure they're right, because they use it as an argument for using their field-replication-based solution.

Hibernate copies values in L2 Cache, so the Person#1 object would be [1, "Some Person", "Some Family", 42, "Some Address"]. And hibernate does not manage L2 caches to that degree. It almost only puts values and gets values. Distributed caches are transparent to hibernate, and I don't believe there is a cache that supports field replications. However, asynch invalidation is not a bad strategy at all.


Farzad-