In the C#/.Net world, there are ORMs such as NHibernate or ActiveRecord that includes transparent caching: database updates are transparently replicated to the cache, objects are retrieved directly from the cache when available, etc (often with memcached).
It doesn't look like transparent caching is available in Perl with DBIx::Class. Did I miss something? That seems like a common need, I'm surprised I couldn't find anything on it on CPAN or Google.
Semi-transparently there is DBIx::Class::Cursor::Cached (from mst, like DBIC). You need to provide a Cache object to your connections or schema objects though. Seems very undocumented unfortunately.
The Cookbook does have an example for using Tie::Cache on DBIC, and there are also the (get|set|clear)_cache functions on DBIx::Class::ResultSet, but they are probably not exactly what you need.