DBCache: A Project on Database Caching Support for Web Applications

In this talk, I will discuss IBM Almaden's DBCache project whose goal
is to support database caching for use with web-based applications. I
will introduce a new database object called Cache Table that enables
persistent caching of the full or partial content of a remote database
table. The content of a cache table is either defined declaratively
and populated in advance at setup time, or determined dynamically and
populated on demand at query execution time. Dynamic cache tables
exploit the characteristics of typical transactional web applications
with a high volume of short transactions, simple equality predicates,
and 3-4 way joins. Based on federated query processing capabilities,
we developed a set of new technologies for database caching: cache
tables, "Janus" (two-headed) query execution plans, cache constraints,
and asynchronous cache population methods. Our solution supports
transparent caching both at the edge of content delivery networks and
in the middle-tier of an enterprise application infrastructure,
improving the response time, throughput and scalability of
transactional web applications. This is joint work with M. Altinel,
C. Bornhoevd, S. Krishnamurthy, H. Pirahesh and B. Reinwald. The paper
on which this talk is based was published in the 29th International
Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB).