Middle-tier database caching for e-business Qiong Luo, Sailesh Krishnamurthy, C. Mohan, Hamid Pirahesh, Honguk Woo, Bruce G. Lindsay, and Jeffrey F. Naughton   View Paper (PDF)   Return to Industrial sessions 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. DiSC'03 © 2003 Association for Computing Machinery