Ahh, dirty reads when you need data integrity are dangerous. (They're fine for things like a UI, where the consumer of state is essentially transient.) I'm not

Ahh, dirty reads when you need data integrity are dangerous. (They're fine for things like a UI, where the consumer of state is essentially transient.) I'm not too familiar with your database, but I wonder if you could have a "read transaction" with such a short timeout that you could return a "try again soon" error to the cache? (The only time I dealt with dirty reads like this was Microsoft SQL, I suspect you're using something with very different transaction semantics or guarantees.)