Middle-tier database caching for e-business

Abstract

While scaling up to the enormous and growing Internet population with unpredictable usage patterns, E-commerce applications face severe challenges in cost and manageability, especially for database servers that are deployed as those applications' backends in a multi-tier configuration. Middle-tier database caching is one solution to this problem. In this paper, we present a simple extension to the existing federated features in DB2 UDB, which enables a regular DB2 instance to become a DBCache without any application modification. On deployment of a DBCache at an application server, arbitrary SQL statements generated from the unchanged application that are intended for a backend database server, can be answered: at the cache, at the backend database server, or at both locations in a distributed manner. The factors that determine the distribution of workload include the SQL statement type, the cache content, the application requirement on data freshness, and cost-based optimization at the cache. We have developed a research prototype of DBCache, and conducted an extensive set of experiments with an E-Commerce benchmark to show the benefits of this approach and illustrate tradeoffs in caching considerations.