Sebastien Tardif I have no idea what "still valid" means.

As for in the cache or not.. there is a tipping point where what you suggest is or is not more performant. And to a degree that is the intent of CacheMode discussion. Not so much in terms of determining whether to pull data from the database for certain ids I was just handed... more in terms of deciding how to handle data I get back from the database in terms of any potential data in the L2 cache.