What Spring Data Tests Can Miss: Testing Beyond Hibernate’s Persistence Context (Chapter 7)

Here's the mechanism, before the war story: every EntityManager keeps a first-level cache, an identity map of every entity it's touched in the current persistence context. Call find() (which is what loadById resolves to, directly or through Spring Data's derived findById) for an entity that's already managed, and Hibernate doesn't ask the database anything. It just hands you back the object it already has. That's not a bug. It's the entire point of the first-level cache, and most of the time it'