US Patent 7136879 System and method for read-only entity bean caching

Separate instances of a data item can be allocated for each transaction in a system. Each instance can be held by an entity bean capable of updating by either reading a copy of the data item from the database or by reading a copy from another entity bean. When the data item in the database is changed, the system can notify each entity bean that it should read an updated copy of the data item before the next transaction.