Hibernate cache vs spring cache

Question

Can anybody explain what is the difference between hibernate second level cache vs spring cache.?

Does it make sense to use both in single application? If it is not recommend then when to use which one?

Appreciated if someone give real life Scenario based explain, it can help much to understand easily.

Answer 1

These are two completely different technologies. Hibernate and Hibernate Cache are applicable in general when you're working with Relational Databases. Then you can use Hibernate ORM to generate queries, store objects, etc. The domain model is written in java (entities). Sometimes it makes sense to cache some of these entities in memory to speed up the query, so you cache them with Hibernate Cache. There are many different kinds of caching there, I won't dive into the details, because its a general question, but read here if you want to know more about Hibernate Caching

Now spring caching is done by Spring and in general, it has nothing to do with the Relational Databases/ JDBC world, in other words outside the realm of Hibernate. You can cache an object to avoid, for example, call to MongoDb, or to avoid an expensive calculation to be done twice. You can cache the data in memory or in more advanced distributed technologies like Hazelcast, Redis or Infinispan (there are others as well).

Here you can find an introductory material to Spring Caching. And this is a way more complete official documentation

So yes, to directly answer your question, it might make sense to use both in a single application :) I really think you should get familiar with both, at least at the level of concepts and their goals, and then decide what is applicable in your case.

Answer 2

One of their main differences is hibernate 2nd level cache will automatically help to maintain the cached entities whenever there are any updates or deletes of the cached entities while Spring cache is a more general purpose cache which know nothing about Hibernate and so you have to invalidate the stale cache entities manually for such cases.

Also the entities cached by Hibernate 2nd level cache will be managed by it while in spring-cache it will become detached. And dealing with the detached entities is not easy if you are not familiar with it.

It always depend on the context whether it makes sense to use both caches. For me , using Hibernate 2nd level cache requires some learning curve in order to use it correctly . Spring cache is more flexible due to its general purpose nature but it requires to do more work by yourself.

I would use Hibernate 2nd level cache first as it requires to do less things once you master it . And consider to use Spring cache if come across a situation that Hibernate does not support configuring the caching behaviour that I want.

My real life example is that I have some background data cleaning task that requires executing some native queries which causes to remove all entities from 2nd level cache which in turn affect one of my hibernate query cache. Because the native queries is very complex , I fail to control not to invalidate the cache even using the tips mentioned at here. So I change to use Spring cache to cache that query result.

Answer 3

they are totally different

1. hibernate second level

Hibernate second level cache is used in the context of Hibernate, so all the session share the same instance. It's deactivated by default and in order to use it, you should enable it like this:

hibernate.cache.use_second_level_cache=true

In order to make an entity eligible for second-level caching, we annotate it with Hibernate specific @org.hibernate.annotations.Cache annotation and specify a cache concurrency strategy.

Some developers consider that it is a good convention to add the standard @javax.persistence.Cacheable annotation as well (although not required by Hibernate), so an entity class implementation might look like this:

Example

@Entity
@Cacheable
@org.hibernate.annotations.Cache(usage = CacheConcurrencyStrategy.READ_WRITE)
public class Foo {
    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.AUTO)
    @Column(name = "ID")
    private long id;

    @Column(name = "NAME")
    private String name;
    
    // getters and setters
}

2. Spring cache

if Hibernate second level cache is used for caching instance of JPA entities and query result, spring cache aimed to cache spring beans.

Example

@Cacheable("addresses")
public String getAddress(Customer customer) {...}

The getAddress() call will first check the cache addresses before actually invoking the method and then caching the result.

I hope I was clear in my explanation