Caches and Queue Stores Are Short-Term

Datastores can be complicated and frustrating if you don’t know how to use them properly. The different types of databases have different purposes, different ways of completing tasks and different sets of drawbacks. Knowing what datastore to use for a specific purpose is the key to working with your data efficiently and effectively. In this installment of our datastores series, we will discuss caches and queue stores, what they are good for and what drawbacks they present.

Caches are a different beast than other databases and datastores. The data in a cache is meant to be ephemeral. It works by taking data and giving it a place to live where you can reference it, usually in memory, when needed. Caches are meant to take data from any other datastore and put it in a place to be accessed quickly. Caches move around data faster and are meant to respond to request for data faster. Depending on the datastore and depending on the cache, the response from the datastore is going to be hashed either based on the query that was requested, or the result of that query. The benefit is that once it’s hashed, it’s in the cache. So, the next time you run that same query, it returns faster.

A cache functions like a key in an object store. You have a key, whether it’s a hash query or hash response. Once you have the key, the cache will return the same response over and over and you don’t ever have to run the query again because you can look up where it is. The response is static, unchanging, and you’re not actually doing anything.

***Click here for full text***

Originally published at https://www.pwvconsultants.com on July 30, 2020.