Results Cache in Oracle

Oracle 11g has a new hint telling data to persist in cache for x number of minutes.

The syntax is:

select /*+ result_cache */ * from test.customer

This could be interesting for tables that do not change much, since any change to the table can invalidate the cache. One simple way would be for a token in the INT file marking if the file changes seldom.

Recommendation: Investigate further. This could though have some unforeseen impacts. I am leaning towards recommending that we instead look at tuning servers for more memory (which also caches) and client side cache.