I recently had a chance to review an enterprise level caching solution from the folks at Alachisoft called NCache. Our development team was in the market for a scalable solution to high database load which was sapping the life from our database server. NCache is an in-memory cache which can be distributed among a cluster of servers to both improve reliability and performance of data intensive apps.

The key benefit of NCache is that it dramatically improves the task of reading data from the database. The caching tier saves a copy of the data the first time it is requested and then draws from that copy to service future requests. This data can either expire after a designated period of time or it can be refreshed via the event notification system in SQL Server 2005. NCache isn't limited to reading from a large aggregated data sets either, the product also offers a comprehensive IIS/ASP.Net state solution which shares session information seamlessly across web clusters. The ASP.Net session cache integrates into existing applications with only a minor change to the site's web.config file.

The bad news is that NCache isn't cheap. In the case of the application block in-memory cache product the licensed on a per CPU basis meaning that if you have a eight CPU dual core server you'll have to shell out for eight licenses. According to the website this conveniently falls into the $1495/CPU price range, or $11960, and that is for only one server! Still if you have the budget and are looking for an enterprise level solution to data caching then NCache is worth a look.

You can read more about NCache at Alachisoft's web site.

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