AppFabric Caching - Query Distributed Cache

Question

Is it possible to query AppFabric Caching like a Database ? (search) There are Tag-Based Methods but they can only be used with objects stored in regions ; regions are limited to a single cache host ; it's not very usefull.

Thanks,

Answer 1

There's only tags and they do indeed come with the limitation of being in a region which then limits it to a single node. If you use high availability (HA) that region is at least replicated within the cluster, but the active queries are still only fulfilled by the single node.

Confirmation of this fact can be found in the following paragraphs from this MSDN topic:

To provide this added search functionality, objects in a region are limited to a single cache host. Thus, applications that use that data cannot realize the scalability benefits of a distributed cache. In contrast, if you do not specify a region, cached objects can be load balanced across all cache hosts in the cache cluster.

Regions offer searching capabilities, but by limiting cached objects to a single cache host, the use of regions presents a trade-off between functionality and scalability.