Csqlcache Weblog

CSQL Cache, a high performance, bi-directional, updateable database caching infrastructure that sits between the clustered application process and back-end data sources to provide unprecedented high throughput to your application.

Improving Database Performance Using Database Cache

Many applications today are being developed and deployed on multi-tier environments that involve browser-based clients, web application servers and backend databases. These applications need to generate web pages on-demand by talking to backend databases because of their dynamic nature, making middle-tier database caching an effective approach to achieve high scalability and performance. Following are the advantages of database caching

Scalability: distribute query workload from backend to multiple cheap front-end systems.
Flexibility: achieve QoS, where each cache hosts different parts of the backend data, e.g., the data of Platinum customers are cached while that of ordinary customers is not.
Availability: by continued service for applications that depend only on cached tables even if the backend server is unavailable.
Performance: by potentially responding fast because of locality of data and smoothing out load peaks by avoiding round-trips between middle-tier and data-tier

In order to overcome the throughput barrier, application scales by deploying multiple small systems instead of one single huge system. Companies have developed various homegrown solutions that involve database caching to scale up their applications. These caching solutions can help accelerate database performance to some extent, but they are fairly ineffective as most of them support only result set caching and some are poor at dealing with the scalability. Some of these caching solutions use heavy weight, full-fledged database management system to cache the data at the middle-tier, which yields less performance gain. These caching solutions are mostly read only and some do provide tools for doing manual lazy updates. For frequently changing data, it will be holding “dirty” cached data, resulting in long latency periods that may be entirely unacceptable for applications requiring immediate access to current data.

For complete set of features supported by CSQL cache, refer the data sheet on the product web site. http://www.csqldb.com