Hijacking the post for a moment to serve devs outside of the world of Rails: .NET developers looking to do the same things in an ASP.NET ecosystem should look at the ASP.NET 2.0 caching API.

In a Facebook/Mergelabs scenario, where users are continually updating the DB, you probably DON’T want a database triggered cache invalidation/SqlCacheDependency which refreshes cache on changes to the underlying datasource. .NET/MS SQL Server will give you that flexibility; if the memcache docs are to believed, MySQL query caching does not.

Best if you have the time: ASP.NET 2.0 allows you to inherit and extend the CacheDependency class: you can set your own dependencies/triggers based around the particular object structures and needs of your custom app. Database-bound data is the obvious trigger but you aren’t limited to DBs: changes to subelements of files, folders, and other data containers can also trigger cache refresh. You can set very finely grained conditions for these behaviors, refreshing and Not refreshing the cache as required by your app.

-KF

By Ken Fine (Nee Bogle) on 01.28.08 3:07 pm