Oracle True Cache offers a powerful solution for data caching in enterprise environments, effectively addressing challenges posed by growing data volumes and the need for real-time access. By improving application response times and reducing database server loads, it helps organizations achieve reliable, low-latency data access for critical applications. True Cache is built with scalability and performance as core principles, ensuring it meets the demands of modern enterprise systems.

Why Choose Oracle True Cache?

Caching data in the app tier is an essential development pattern. It lightens the load on databases, potentially speeding up query responses. However, it presents its own challenges. Existing solutions in the market often burden developers with decisions about what data to cache, how long to cache it, cache eviction policies, handling failures, and data formatting. This complexity results in intricate code to manage mid-tier caches.

Oracle True Cache is an in-memory, consistent, and automatically managed SQL and object cache for Oracle Database. It is designed to address the pressing needs of global enterprises for unparalleled performance and scalability. This solution simplifies caching against Oracle Database. Developers deploy a diskless True Cache instance and leave the rest to Oracle. Using Active Dataguard technology, Oracle True Cache ensures cache consistency with the latest primary instance changes, fetching data for cache misses. With minimal code changes to indicate cache usage, leveraging a resilient, high-performance cache in sync with the primary database has never been easier.

True Cache is ideal for a wide range of applications across various industries, enabling enhanced data accessibility and processing efficiency. Whether it’s powering e-commerce platforms, facilitating Real-Time Analytics, supporting Online Gaming environments, enabling high-frequency Trading, or facilitating Edge Computing applications, True Cache ensures optimal performance and scalability, enabling organizations to thrive in today’s fast-paced digital landscape.

True Cache Use-Cases

Key capabilities of Oracle True Cache:

Automated Data Loading: True Cache seamlessly loads data from the primary database as needed, eliminating the requirement for additional application logic to prime the cache. This automated process delivers optimal performance without any manual intervention.

Automated Data Refresh: Keeping data synchronized with the primary database is effortless with True Cache’s automated refresh mechanism powered by Oracle Data Guard redo apply technology. Data blocks in the cache are refreshed promptly within seconds of changes on the primary database, obviating the need to code for cache invalidation logic or any time-to-live configurations.

Table and Dataset Pinning: True Cache enables the pinning of specific tables and datasets, preventing crucial data from eviction due to memory constraints or LRU algorithms. Pinned data is automatically refreshed in real-time as changes occur on the primary database. Leverage the KEEP buffer pool to maintain frequently accessed tables persistently within the buffer pool.

Result Cache: True Cache maximizes efficiency through its Server-Side Result Set Cache, which stores query results, query fragments, and PL/SQL functions in memory. Additionally, it offers the client-side result set cache feature, enabling caching of SQL query result sets directly in client memory for enhanced performance and responsiveness.

Automated DDL Propagation: Any Data Definition Language (DDL) modifications performed on the primary database are seamlessly propagated to True Cache in real-time, ensuring that cached data remains consistent with the latest schema changes without disrupting ongoing operations.

Cache consistency within and across caches: True Cache automatically ensures that the data stored in the cache remains consistent both within the cache and across multiple caches. This means that the values within the same object, such as different columns of a table or attributes in a JSON document, remain consistent. Additionally, True Cache ensures consistency across multiple database objects, like various tables with integrity constraints. In a typical setup with two caches, one for customer data and one for orders, the customer cache might have more recent data than the order cache. True Cache ensures that data remains consistent across caches. This capability upholds the accuracy and reliability of cached data, enhancing the overall performance of applications.

Lock-Free Concurrency Control: True Cache supports the Oracle database’s lock-free optimistic concurrency control with ETAG. ETAGs ensure data consistency in microservices-based applications utilizing REST-based access over HTTP, a connectionless protocol.

Database Smart Flash Cache: True Cache offers the flexibility to store data on disk when it exceeds the memory capacity of the True Cache compute instance. This capability enables the cache to accommodate larger datasets than what can be held solely in memory, effectively expanding the total cache size. By incorporating flash devices and configuring Database Smart Flash Cache, organizations can seamlessly augment the capacity of True Cache, ensuring optimal performance and scalability for data-intensive workloads.

Comprehensive Data Type and Format Support: True Cache supports all Oracle Database API and Data Types, covering relational, JSON, text, spatial, graph, and vector data types. Data stored in True Cache can be accessed in either row or columnar format using familiar Oracle database APIs.

Smart Client Drivers: Oracle JDBC driver automatically detects the presence of True Cache and can separate read-only from read-write requests. Queries specified by the application as read-only are automatically routed to the cache. This simplifies applications by eliminating the need to maintain separate connections to the primary database and the cache.

 

True Cache Architecture

                                                                                Architecture

Oracle True Cache can help you:

  • Improve scalability and performance by offloading query processing tasks from the primary database.
  • Reduce application response time and network latency by deploying True Cache closer to your application. This is particularly advantageous in scenarios with data residency requirements.
  • Improve throughput with a bigger aggregate cache, creating a large, in-memory storage area by dividing data across multiple True Cache instances.
  • Streamline document-centric application development by leveraging Oracle Database’s Document and Relational duality alongside True Cache for enhanced efficiency in data storage and retrieval.
  • Simplify development and maintenance processes as True Cache operates transparently to the application.
  • Reduce costs by offload caching to commodity hardware.

In essence, Oracle True Cache represents a significant stride forward in data caching solutions, providing a potent asset for businesses navigating the ever-changing realm of data management. In an era, where real-time information and personalized online experiences are paramount, the speed and responsiveness of applications can make or break user engagement. True Cache alleviates these concerns by offering a robust, high-performance caching solution that accelerates application response times and reduces latency, thereby providing seamless access to real-time information.  

Moreover, True Cache leverages the comprehensive capabilities of the Oracle database ecosystem, incorporating enterprise-grade features such as indices, secondary indices, parallel query, compression, partitioning, and security measures. With built-in high availability, True Cache offers data resilience and continuous availability, even in the face of node failures or network disruptions. By harnessing parallel processing, True Cache delivers extreme performance, meeting the demands of modern data-intensive applications. Ultimately, True Cache equips organizations with the agility and efficiency requisite for staying competitive and fostering success.

Resources

Web page: https://www.oracle.com/in/database/truecache/

Documentation: https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/23/odbtc/index.html

To learn more and get started, visit Oracle True Cache.