Report Number: CS-TN-97-61
Institution: Stanford University, Department of Computer Science
Title: Performance Analysis of an Associative Caching Scheme for
Client-Server Databases
Author: Julie Basu, Meikel Poess, Arthur M. Keller
Date: September
Abstract: This paper presents a detailed performance study of the
associative caching scheme proposed in "A Predicate-based
Caching Scheme for Client-Server Database Architectures," The
VLDB Journal, Jan 1996. A client cache dynamically loads
query results in the course of transaction execution, and
formulates a description of its current contents.
Predicate-based reasoning is used on the cache description to
examine and maintain the cache. The benefits of the scheme
include local evaluation of associative queries, at the cost
of maintaining the cached query results through update
notifications >From the server. In this paper, we investigate
through detailed simulation the behavior of this caching
scheme for a client-server database under different workloads
and contention profiles. An optimized version of our basic
caching scheme is also proposed and studied. We examine both
read-only and update transactions, with the effect of updates
on the caching performance as our primary focus. Using an
extended version of a standard database benchmark, we
identify scenarios where these caching schemes improve the
system performance and scalability, as compared to systems
without client-side caching. Our results demonstrate that
associative caching can be beneficial even for moderately
high update activity.
http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tn/97/61/CS-TN-97-61.pdf