Microsoft Caching Application Block w/ Web Farm

[Kevin Burrowes]

I need to implement caching for a large enterprise application and we are
planning to use the newest Caching Application Blocks. (Enterprise Library
Jan. 2006)

We want to cache Business Entities (DTO's) at the service layer and have a
few questions.

Are there other options than using Microsoft Caching blocks - possibly open
source?

The application will be on a web farm so from what I understand we need to
store the cache in SQL and am confused to the benefit of this since the
whole point of caching is to avoid hitting a database.

What design pattern could we use to implement this into our application?

thanks.

Kevin

[Bruce Barker]

web farm caching has a few issues you must address.

1) how stale can the cache be?
2) how often is it updated?
3) how to flag an update?
4) how quick must the cache be?
5) do you need a distributed lock manager?

once you answered these question, you can evaluate caching schemes.
-- bruce (sqlwork.com)

"Kevin Burrowes" <ke***********@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:ux**************@tk2msftngp13.phx.gbl...

I need to implement caching for a large enterprise application and we are
planning to use the newest Caching Application Blocks. (Enterprise Library
Jan. 2006)

We want to cache Business Entities (DTO's) at the service layer and have a
few questions.

Are there other options than using Microsoft Caching blocks - possibly
open source?

The application will be on a web farm so from what I understand we need to
store the cache in SQL and am confused to the benefit of this since the
whole point of caching is to avoid hitting a database.

What design pattern could we use to implement this into our application?

thanks.

Kevin