Is it appropriate to use AtomicReference.compareAndSet to set a reference to the results of a database call?

Question

I am implementing a simple cache with the cache stored as an AtomicReference.

private AtomicReference<Map<String, String>> cacheData;

The cache object should be populated (lazily) from a database table.

I provide a method to return the cache data to a caller, but if the data is null (ie. not loaded), then the code needs to load the data from the database. To avoid synchronized I thought of using the compareAndSet() method:

public Object getCacheData() {
  cacheData.compareAndSet(null, getDataFromDatabase()); // atomic reload only if data not set!
  return Collections.unmodifiableMap(cacheData.get());
}

Is it ok to use compareAndSet in this way ie. to involve a database call as part of the atomic action? Is it any better/worse than just synchronizing the method?

Many thanks for any advice..

Answer 1

You do not achieve expected behaviour. This expression:

cacheData.compareAndSet(null, getDataFromDatabase())

will always call getDataFromDatabase() first. This means that it doesn't matter if the data was cached or not. If it was, you still call the database, but discard the results. The cache is working, but the performance is equally poor.

Consider this instead:

if(cacheData.get() == null) {
    cacheData.compareAndSet(null, unmodifiableMap(getDataFromDatabase()));
}
return cacheData.get());

It's not perfect (still getDataFromDatabase() can be called multiple times at the beginning), but will work later as expected. Also I moved Collections.unmodifiableMap() earlier so that you don't have to wrap the same map over and over again.

Which brings us to even simpler implementation (no synchronized or AtomicReference needed):

private volatile Map<String, String> cacheData;

if(cacheData == null) {
  cacheData = unmodifiableMap(getDataFromDatabase());
}
return cacheData;