Using Hibernate maven artifact:

<dependency>
<groupId>org.hibernate</groupId>
<artifactId>hibernate</artifactId>
<version>3.2.6.ga</version>
</dependency>

So I got caching working fine, the question is...

Why is hibernate sending a BEGIN TRANSACTION/END TRANSACTION to the DB if the read data is coming from the cache. I traced SQL and I can clearly see that the cache is kicking in since there are no SELECT or other statements sent to the DB.

I suppose it would be to hard to implement the type of logic to only send a BEGIN TRANSACTION the moment it is only needed?