Monday, June 16, 2008

Microsoft Velocity

Microsoft has recently released the CTP (Community Technology Preview) version of their in-memory caching server called Velocity. It's an alternative to 3rd party solutions such as MemCache and Tangosol/Oracle TimesTen that do a pretty good job of storing data within the RAM of multiple servers, effectively speeding up data retrieval for similar queries if used correctly.

The Velocity server is a pretty small download at under 3MB so it wouldn't hurt to try it out, even if you're on a slow link.

The source code to use Velocity looks a little like this:

CacheFactory myCacheFactory = new CacheFactory();
Cache myDefaultCache = myCacheFactory.GetCache("default");
myDefaultCache.Add("key1", "value1");
string retrieved = myDefaultCache.Get("key1") as string;


There's more source code available for using cache regions, but you don't really need it to get started.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

NCache has a FREE version called NCache Express with a size of 10.0MB which is a small size for a complete product with so many features. We also have Enterprise Edition of NCache with a 60 days trial version. You can download NCache Express from http://alachisoft.com/download.html

NCache has been the caching solution of choice for various mission critical applications throughout the world since 2005. Its scalability, high availability and performance are the reasons it has earned the trust of developers, senior IT and management personnel within high profile companies. These companies are involved in a range of endeavors including ecommerce, financial services, health services and airline services.

Hadi
Team NCache

Nitin Reddy Katkam said...

Hi Hadi!

Thanks for your comment. It's always nice to hear from someone involved in the development of the product.

I've read about NCache but haven't met anyone who has used it and can share their experiences with it yet.

-Nitin

Anonymous said...

Hi Nitin,
NCache is currently being used by couple of large European airlines, one of the top 3 banks in the world, health insurance companies and many more in different verticals. People donot blog much about it as some of them have the company policy. This is also one of the reasons I am not mentioning their names here.

Hadi
Team NCache

Nitin Reddy Katkam said...

If you're in search of other caching systems, take a look at:

Shared Cache (Open source)

You can find the results of tests performed with Shared Cache on Roni Schuetz blog

ScaleOut StateServer (Commercial)

They charge roughly $1,000 per server.