RE: ANTs Data Server?

  • From: "Ellis R. Miller" <sartre1@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 2 Sep 2004 06:08:52 -0600

I have worked with various persistence layer tools, in particular, TopLink
(the OR mapping tool) prior to Oracle actually purchasing it.

TopLink provided the ability to map Oracle relational tables to objects,
hence the Object-Relational part. So, three normalized tables could be
mapped to a single object which would parallel the OO or, in this case, the
Java world allowing the Java developers to code against an object in a 1-1
correspondence to their modeling. At the time, which was circa 2000, the
TopLink OR mapping tool provided a cache in which objects that were read
only or simply had not been IUD (there were various ways to manage this)
were read from memory not requiring a call to the database. Like EJB CMP
TopLink managed this for the developer...but you know how that often works
out.

I have also worked with Enterprise Java Beans using CMP (Container Managed
Persistence) in which the entity bean data being synchronized with the
database is handled by the AS, such as WebLogic or WebSphere. Using CMP the
entity bean data storage is abstracted/persisted absent an insert, update,
delete to the database. (Sounds great and so did EJB in school).

I have worked with several more basic ntier Java applications with Oracle on
the backend and a middle tier consisting of an Apache/JServ web server for
dynamic content (requiring calls to the database) and another Apache/JServ
server for serving up known static content. This worked very well in
reducing network congestion, blah, blah, blah.

More recently I helped architect and prototype a .NET application leveraging
IIS and ADO .NET datasets to cache both static data and data read from the
database...which is fairly simple to understand but I do not have a lot of
exposure to nor much practical experience outside of the initial
proof-of-concept.

Finally, I helped write a persistence layer (many white papers on this)
several years ago in Java and it worked just dandy, too, although I think I
almost died that month.

In addition, JDO (Java Data Objects) was designed to improve on the EJB
mechanism for creating/managing an object abstraction and persistence layer:
http://java.sun.com/products/jdo/ A good friend and Java programmer told me
the performance of JDO was infinitely superior to EJB CMP, in particular,
yet ran into some very esoteric "Java" issues in having to extend the API in
order to rig some missing functionality...probably why the implementation
and performance, in part, is faster and simpler:)

In terms of PHP the PDO specification is developing (similar to JDO from
what I can tell) but, again, this may not be necessary with a typical web
application as the PHP applications I have written, also using HTML and
JavaScript, of course, either contained static pages or dynamic (always or
occasional calls to the database required) and caching the static content
was easy to configure and definitely improved performance:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/php_experts/otn_pdo_oracle5.ht
ml

In a word (hip hop term) explicitly architecting an ntier application to
cache static pages, such as a dedicated Apache web server for this purpose,
is very important in building scalable, commercial ntier web applications
and you will be happy you did...you can tell your grandkids about it
someday. (Unnecessary calls to the database to populate a static web page,
which I have seen many times, are always bad including the overhead of the
connections, whether it be shared servers or dedicated in the case of
Oracle...yada, yada, yada).

Personally, I would skip the EJB water torture these days yet might consider
JDO and definitely would consider ADO .NET and ASPs if it ran on Linux (Mono
Project)...TopLink I have not followed to closely since the Oracle purchase
and PDO is so new I know little about it and so do they:)

Ellis



-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of ryan gaffuri
Sent: Wednesday, September 01, 2004 8:53 PM
To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: ANTs Data Server?


has anyone worked with middle tier caching of read only data? About six
months I went to a presentation by a non-database performance analyst(he
analyzed the applications) and he was adament about caching data in the
middle to relieve unnecessary hits on the database.

has anyone exploited this?
----- Original Message -----
From: "Cary Millsap" <cary.millsap@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, September 01, 2004 9:58 AM
Subject: RE: ANTs Data Server?


> I just don't get the whole "cache everything, and everything will be ok"
> argument. The vast majority of the slow tasks I've seen in the past ten
> years have all executed "in cache" to begin with!
>

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