We’ve been doing a lot of work at Terracotta lately on our new clustered Hibernate second level cache. If you’re interested in kicking the tires during our beta program, please drop us an email on the contact emails or forums.

In talking to lots of people about Hibernate we’ve noticed that because caches are only useful when they’re hot, people spend a lot of effort look at cache loading and cache warming in their application. This is an area where Terracotta has the potential to yield some big improvements because your cache data is already persistent in the Terracotta server array and it’s potentially faster to load from the Terracotta server memory over the network than from your database.

We’ve kicked around a bunch of ideas for this but haven’t decided yet on a particular direction and we’d really like to hear more from people that have solved this problem and what kinds of things would be useful. If you have any feedback on how you do this, please comment here or drop me an email at contact at puredanger.com.