Probing in AppFabric

Question

I am new to Windows Server AppFabric caching. I have configured it in XML mode, and have tried basic sample porgrams on it. I am trying to develop my own cache now.Is it possible to use any of the probing techniques (linear, quadratic, hashing, etc.) with AppFabric. Also if yes, is it advisable to use it?

Answer 1

My experience with AppFabric was that it was mainly a key/value store. In addition to a key and a value for an object, you can tag it, which is just a list of strings that describe the object.

I tried to tag objects to introduce some meta data (because the key wasn't enough to describe my objects) and it became a nightmare to run analysis on.

I would tag objects and then try to answer questions like, "Product XYZ has changed. Go find all instances of it in the cache and invalidate them." Even though I embedded that information in tags, it was slow and complicated to solve.

I also tried to introduce structures in AppFabric that managed AppFabric objects. Basically indexes of items. That too proved to be a bit difficult to manage.

I would look at something like Redis for caching as they seem to support some fun data structures out of the box beyond key/value.