Replacing a cache service with a database
1–10 of 69 posts
Re: Replacing a cache service with a database
#2So close to getting push driven architecture...
Re: Replacing a cache service with a database
#3The cache service is a database of sorts that usually stores key value pairs.
The difference is in persistence and scaling and read/write permissions
Re: Replacing a cache service with a database
#4Rails also has a take on this https://github.com/rails/solid_cache
Re: Replacing a cache service with a database
#5This is a good deep dive into the complexity around caching: https://stack.convex.dev/caching-in
Having caching by default (like in Convex) is a really neat simplification to app development.
Re: Replacing a cache service with a database
#6A friend of mine once argued that adding a cache to a system is almost always an indication that you have an architectural problem further down the stack, and you should try to address that instead.
The more software development experience I gain the more I agree with him on that!
Re: Replacing a cache service with a database
#7Maybe these distinctions are useful to people in some situations, but to me this reads like wondering whether we can replace houses with buildings.
Re: Replacing a cache service with a database
#8A friend of mine once argued that adding a cache to a system is almost always an indication that you have an architectural problem further down the stack, and you should try to address that instead. The more software development experience I gain the more I agree with him on that!
Yeah my architecture problem is that Postgres RDS EBS storage is slow as dog. Sure our data won’t go poof if we lose an instance but it’s so slow.
(It’s not really my architecture problem. My architecture problem is that we store pages as grains of sand in a db instead of in a bucket, and that we allow user defined schemas)
Re: Replacing a cache service with a database
#9A friend of mine once argued that adding a cache to a system is almost always an indication that you have an architectural problem further down the stack, and you should try to address that instead. The more software development experience I gain the more I agree with him on that!
That's true in my experience.
Caches have perfectly valid uses, but they are so often used in fundamentally poor ways, especially with databases.
Re: Replacing a cache service with a database
#10A friend of mine once argued that adding a cache to a system is almost always an indication that you have an architectural problem further down the stack, and you should try to address that instead. The more software development experience I gain the more I agree with him on that!
I disagree. For large search pages where you're building payloads from multiple records that don't change often, it could be beneficial to use a cache. Your cache ends up helping the most common results to be fetched less often and return data faster.