Can Terracotta's BigMemory Go be used without EHCache?

Question

For an upcoming project I will keep a large amount of data (up to 10GB) in RAM, but not as a cache. Is is possible to use BigMemory (in particular Go, i.e. the free edition) without EH Cache, simply as a non garbage collected memory storage? I have not found a clear answer in the docs, which mostly talk about the typical integration with EHCache.

Thank you.

Answer 1

Yes, EhCache is the API for BigMemory:

BigMemory Go currently uses Ehcache as its user-facing data access API.

Answer 2

Basically, the way BigMemory has been designed is as sort of another storage tier. You store things in the heap exceeding which you store things offheap (which is the bigmemory) and then exceeding which you store things on the disk. It makes sense to do so because in the nosql paradigm where we want to store bigdata; things work well if they are in key-value form. You can choose to store any kind of value by just making it serializable. As for your constraint of "not as a cache", its very much possible to configure the cache so that values don't get evicted from the memory. Anyways if you use BigMemory Go, you get a limit of 32GB so storing 10GB won't trigger any eviction algorithms even without any configuration.