Loading a Cache with Query Results

Data intensive applications today usually run in either a client-server or a middleware environment. In either case, they must efficiently handle both database queries, which process large numbers of data objects, and application logic, with its fine-grained object accesses (e.g., method calls). Sophisticated optimization techniques speed up query processing, while caching is used to reduce the cost of the application logic. Query processing and caching decisions are typically made in isolation, though often in applications queries are used to identify those objects the application will further process. We propose a wholistic approach to speeding up such applications: we load the cache of a system with relevant objects as a by-product of query processing. This can potentially improve the performance of the application, by eliminating the need to fault in objects. However, it can also increase the cost of queries by forcing them to handle more data, thus potentially reducing the perform..