A Self Managing Data Cache for Edge of Network Web Applications (Report title: DBProxy: A Self-Managing Edge-Of-Network Data Cache)

Database caching at the edge of the network enables dynamic content generation to be offloaded to edge servers, improving the scalability and responsiveness of web applications. In this paper, we describe DBProxy, a transparent edge-of-network data cache which requires little or no administrator involvement. DBProxy’s local cache is a database engine that maintains partial but semantically consistent materialized views of previous query results. DBProxy is designed to be self-managing and to adapt to changes in the work-load in a transparent and graceful fashion by caching a large number of overlapping and dynamically changing "materialized views". New "views" are added automatically while others may be discarded to save space. A common-schema table storage policy is used to avoid redundancy and share physical storage among overlapping views whenever possible. In this paper, we describe our self-managing cache, and novel consistency and cache replacement algorithms that work well in such a dynamic environment. We perform an evaluation of DBProxy using the TPC-Wbenchmark and find that it reduces query response times by up to 75%, while reducing network and server load.