Once you've solved the problem of figuring out how to be made aware that the external app has changed the db, suggest you ask on the Hibernate forums for the best approach on how to remove data from the cache. Hibernate has some APIs for flushing stuff from the cache; using those APIs is a better approach than trying to directly manipulate the cache yourself. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4127054#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...