Giorgio Sironi has recently posted a look at one of the more popular design patterns - the Repository pattern. He talks about how it can be used for two things: to create a collection of objects and the reuse of queries and their results.

A common infrastructure problem of an object-oriented application is how to deal with persistence and retrieval of objects. The most common way to obtain references to entities (for example, instances of the User, Group and Post class of a domain) is through navigation from another entity. [...] A Repository implementation provides the illusion of having an in-memory collection available, where all the objects of a certain class are kept

He gives an example of a method that grabs user information and encapsulate the database access for it so that it's not required to hit it for every run through their unit tests. He shows how to set up the interface for a GroupRepository and how to implement it in the test.