Data Cache with Distributed Cache: A Design Approach

Abstract

Caching techniques has helped developers to deliver applications that are capable of fast turnaround time which otherwise could have been much slower and under-performed software solutions, less worthy of user's appreciation. Caching can typically be used at both hardware and software levels with the same ultimate goal of either achieving higher throughput or higher latency or both together. Limiting the subject to software level cache, the caching techniques could further be introduced in one of the two categories namely web cache and data cache. While web cache is often defined in the context of a browser which is a clientside application, the data cache is defined in the context of caching needs of a data extensive application. In terms of a database management system, it means a cache provisioned at the database services itself whereas, in the context of the application, it means the cache that spans through layers of the application, more precisely termed as tiers in a multi-tier application that is designed to cache an already queried data. The requirement of frequent data access in high volumes, in distributed applications, drives the need for more capable infrastructure towards building a caching framework. In this paper, we focus our discussion on data cache requirements of a distributed application and the key design factors that distinguish a distributed cache as an elegant cache service provider plugin to such distributed applications. We also propose a simplistic design that could be used to implement the core of a custom distributed cache.