Also there might be some better (commercial?) JDBC drivers that might include request caches that could help boost performance significantly.
For example the free open source C-JDBC driver (http://c-jdbc.objectweb.org/) includes an optional query cache which can cache query results to minimize response time and improve performance scalability. Results seem rather good (cf. p.9 of their white paper: http://c-jdbc.objectweb.org/current/doc/C-JDBC_Flexible_Database_Clustering_Middleware.pdf ), but not tested it on sour side yet... Perhaps worth a try...
Cheers
St�phane
