ScaleArc today announces support for automatic cache invalidation, the world’s first transparent ACID-compliant caching mechanism for dynamic data. A key feature in ScaleArc’s database load balancing software, automatic cache invalidation increases website and application performance by making it safe to cache data that frequently changes, such as shopping cart and user profile information for eCommerce applications. The ScaleArc software tracks data changes to invalidate a cache entry, ensuring outdated data is never served. ScaleArc also provides the ability to handle more workload, reducing page download speeds and increasing website performance while protecting data.
ScaleArc’s auto cache invalidation capability was recently put to the test through an extensive evaluation program conducted by a leading eCommerce company. The company tested the feature across two query sizes, measuring the query-per-second (QPS) rate and response time both with and without ScaleArc’s database load balancing software. Throughout the testing, the company observed that response time with ScaleArc’s software increased 6x to 12x, depending on the query response size. Learn more about ScaleArc’s auto cache invalidation testing and results.
“For any company conducting business online, poor website or application performance can result in users failing to complete a transaction or abandoning the eCommerce site all together,” said Justin Barney, president and CEO of ScaleArc. “With ScaleArc’s database load balancing software and automatic cache invalidation, companies can now cache data that was previously believed to be too risky to cache. By now making this data safe to cache, ScaleArc can bolster business for companies with dynamic data, by reducing their page download times and increasing their overall site availability.”
The predominant use cases for auto cache invalidation include:
- Shopping cart data is tracked for a user in an eCommerce application on every page load. Users browse through several items before the final checkout, which places significant load on the database. Shopping cart data, despite being unique for each user, can now be cached since the auto cache invalidation feature will ensure the shopping cart will reflect changed items immediately.
- User profile data, that is personal data associated with a specific user, is typically the most accessed data for the majority of applications. User profile databases need to have 100% uptime because they are validating users before any transactions can be performed. Data tracking by the auto cache invalidation feature ensures user details are up to date while significantly offloading the database from processing such highly repetitive queries.
- Financial data includes eCommerce sites where users can buy and sell items in an auction and require the auction price and associated data, such as current bidders, to be fetched and updated frequently. Database resources are heavily taxed towards the end of an auction period, when many more users are watching an item and starting a bidding war. Each item has a unique identifier that is used to query the bidding data, making it a prime candidate for auto cache invalidation. Other frequently changing financial data such as stock and option prices or banking information that always needs to be consistent also benefits from the offload offered by ScaleArc’s cache.
ScaleArc’s database load balancing software is available for SQL Server, MySQL, and Oracle database environments. For more information on evaluating ScaleArc’s software, click here.
