To begin with, I'm sorry if this question has been here before but I didn't find it.
I'm a really new Hibernate user, and I have this problem - I execute a query, and get a list of objects. I change some of the objects in the database, possibly by another client. Then, when I execute the query again, Hibernate fetches all the objects again, but doesn't refresh their contents - they don't reflect the database changes. Refreshig happens only if I iterate through the returned list, and call Session.refresh on the objects. I have logging massages which tell me that the SQL for retrieving objects is invoked against the database, and when I call refresh, Hibernate fetches the objects again, one SQL query for each of the iterated objects.
It looks as if the objects are cached somewhere under the hood, and when I call the query which fetches all objects again, they are looked up in the cache (using the id or something) and if a corresponding object is found, it isn't refreshed. When I call Session.refresh with this object, it is refreshed, as I would like.
So my question is - do I have something misconfigured? Or can I switch this caching off somehow? Or maybe this is the desired procedure - call refresh on the objects?
Thanks!

You are correct, and if you look at the hibernate docs, you'll learn a lot about how the cache behaves. In your case, the cache is not the issue - lazy init of objects is. Lazy init is the default behavior of Hibernate and you should familiarize with it asap in order to really KNOW what needs to be lazy-initialized and what should not.
For testing purposes only, you can tag all your classes with "lazy=false" and all collections with lazy="false" - just to see that this time, the query happens immediately, but I would not advise to leave it like this for production environments:


(p.s. please rate if this was helpful :-) ... )