1. A method comprising: caching data that is transferred between a volatile memory used by a database server and a non-volatile storage device that is used to persistently store the data; wherein the step of caching the data includes determining whether or not to store, in the intermediate cache, an item that is involved in a particular database operation based, at least in part, on one or more of: which database object, of a plurality of database objects managed by the database server, the item belongs to; an item type of the item; a characteristic of the item; or the database operation in which the item is involved; wherein the method is performed by one or more computing devices.