RickG,

It certainly sounds like it's a static variable, particularly if you are
only seeing it initialized once.

This is the real kicker. With the cache you can add a cache dependency
so that the hash is automatically re-loaded when the database changes. I
believe that if you are using SqlServer you can reduce the granularity
of the cache dependency to the table level, though I don't actually use
it much.

Now all of a sudden, you have a hash that appears to be static to the
world, but is updated when necessary.

Typically something like:

using System.Web.Hosting;

public static MyHashType Hash
{
  get
  {
    MyHashType hash = HostingEnvironment.Cache["theKey"] as MyHashType;

    if (null == hash)
    {
      hash = LoadHash();
      HostingEnvironment.Cache.Insert("theKey", hash, new
        CacheDependency()); // initialize the dependency as you'd like
    }

    return hash;
  }
}

private static MyHashType LoadHash()
{
  ... does the db work
}

It's basically a lazy load, with built in hashing. The only caveat is
that an external call that needs to look up many things might want to
get a local copy of the cache object, rather than calling the property
directly all of the time.

Hope this makes things easier,
Luke