We have several complex object graphs. In a lot of cases, we relate 1:1 and 1:M objects using property-ref's.

Alas, this causes Hibernate to not use the second level cache, causing horrible performance (tons of SQL statements are generated).

Various fetch-depth strategies have been tried, but increasing this to much have other negative performance effects :-(

Any way to make property-ref relations cached? I'm willing to write a second level cache provider if someone could outline what it would take ot get propery-ref's cached.

Hi,
I'm just curious, what do you mean with
?

did you try this on the property? :
http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/annotations/reference/en/html_single/#d0e2867

property-ref means relations using non-primary key field.

And no, I don't use annotations. I did however mark the field as cached in the mapping file. And that works for relations on primary keys, but not on property-ref mappings.