What type of database did they use? What type of caching would be desirable? Most modern RDBSes, like Postgre, Oracle, or Microsoft SQL server, have internal LRU caching already implemented. InnoDB tries to store everything in memory.
I wonder if they meant that the default caching was turned off, or that all the queries had "no cache" clauses, or that an additional caching layer (Redis, Memcached) was not implemented?