Schema-based cache validation of dynamic content to improve query performance of web services

  • Authors:

  • A. Raghunathan;K. Murugesan

  • Affiliations:

  • Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited, Trichy, India;National Institute of Technology, Trichy, India

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Web Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Web services play a crucial role in e-business, providing application integration within and across enterprises and platforms. Hence there is an increasing need to make web services more efficient and perform better. Caching of data is a vital factor in improving the QoS and query performance of web-based applications. Invalidation mechanisms are used to refresh cache when accessing dynamic data from backend data sources. Time or expiry-based cache validation is suitable for enterprise applications where the data does not change very frequently. However, existing expiry-based caching solutions act at the URL/query level, thus increasing access to the data source and hence the response time. In this paper, we propose a time-based caching technique based on the schema of the data source. Our method performs cache validation at the levels of tables and columns, thus minimizing database access. Moreover, the column level granularity avoids database visits for queries that do not access expired columns. We have used simulations to test our design and the results show a significant improvement in reduction of database accesses for web applications thereby reducing bandwidth usage, server load and network traffic.