Hi Brian, Thanks for your helpful response. You are absolutely correct - the reason I'm looking at doing this is that there are other (read only/reporting) users of the data in the database, who need it in a useful format and not in serialised blobs. I'll have a go at writing my own CacheLoader for my Hibernate objects, and I'll post back to let you know how I go. Cheers, Ian View the original post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4208511#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...