Active Query Caching for Database Web Servers

A substantial portion of web traffic consists of queries to database web servers. Unfortunately, a common technique to improve web scalability, proxy caching, is ineffective for database web servers because existing web proxy servers cannot cache queries. To address this problem, we modify a recently proposed enhanced proxy server, called an active proxy, to enable Active Query Caching. Our approach works by having the server send the proxy a query applet, which can process simple queries at the proxy. This enables the proxy server to share the database server workload as well as to reduce the network traffic. We show both opportunities and limitations of this approach through a performance study. Keywords Active query caching, proxy caching, database web servers. 1. INTRODUCTION Many web sites are constructed using back-end database systems and provide form-based interface for users to submit queries. We call this kind of system a database web server. With the rapid growth of user..