Chapter 2. Creating embedded caches

Add Data Grid to your project to create embedded caches in your applications.

<dependencies>
  <dependency>
    <groupId>org.infinispan</groupId>
    <artifactId>infinispan-core</artifactId>
  </dependency>
</dependencies>

Data Grid provides a GlobalConfigurationBuilder API that controls the Cache Manager and a ConfigurationBuilder API that configures caches.

// Set up a clustered Cache Manager.
GlobalConfigurationBuilder global = GlobalConfigurationBuilder.defaultClusteredBuilder();
// Initialize the default Cache Manager.
DefaultCacheManager cacheManager = new DefaultCacheManager(global.build());
// Create a distributed cache with synchronous replication.
ConfigurationBuilder builder = new ConfigurationBuilder();
                     builder.clustering().cacheMode(CacheMode.DIST_SYNC);
// Obtain a volatile cache.
Cache<String, String> cache = cacheManager.administration().withFlags(CacheContainerAdmin.AdminFlag.VOLATILE).getOrCreateCache("myCache", builder.build());
// Stop the Cache Manager.
cacheManager.stop();

Cache<String, String> myCache = manager.getCache("myCache");

The preceding operation creates a cache named myCache, if it does not already exist, and returns it.

Using the getCache() method creates the cache only on the node where you invoke the method. In other words, it performs a local operation that must be invoked on each node across the cluster. Typically, applications deployed across multiple nodes obtain caches during initialization to ensure that caches are symmetric and exist on each node.

Cache<String, String> myCache = manager.administration().createCache("myCache", "myTemplate");

The preceding operation also automatically creates caches on any nodes that subsequently join the cluster.

Caches that you create with the createCache() method are ephemeral by default. If the entire cluster shuts down, the cache is not automatically created again when it restarts.

Cache<String, String> myCache = manager.administration().withFlags(AdminFlag.PERMANENT).createCache("myCache", "myTemplate");

For the PERMANENT flag to take effect, you must enable global state and set a configuration storage provider.

For more information about configuration storage providers, see GlobalStateConfigurationBuilder#configurationStorage().

Data Grid provides a Cache interface that exposes simple methods for adding, retrieving and removing entries, including atomic mechanisms exposed by the JDK’s ConcurrentMap interface. Based on the cache mode used, invoking these methods will trigger a number of things to happen, potentially even including replicating an entry to a remote node or looking up an entry from a remote node, or potentially a cache store.

For simple usage, using the Cache API should be no different from using the JDK Map API, and hence migrating from simple in-memory caches based on a Map to Data Grid’s Cache should be trivial.

Attempting to perform these operations globally would have large performance impact as well as become a scalability bottleneck. As such, these methods should only be used for informational or debugging purposes only.

It should be noted that using certain flags with the withFlags() method can mitigate some of these concerns, please check each method’s documentation for more details.

In addition to lifespan , Data Grid also supports maxIdle as an additional metric with which to determine expiration. Any combination of lifespans or maxIdles can be used.

To achieve this, putForExternalRead() acts as a put call that only operates if the key is not present in the cache, and fails fast and silently if another thread is trying to store the same key at the same time. In this particular scenario, caching data is a way to optimise the system and it’s not desirable that a failure in caching affects the on-going transaction, hence why failure is handled differently. putForExternalRead() is considered to be a fast operation because regardless of whether it’s successful or not, it doesn’t wait for any locks, and so returns to the caller promptly.

To understand how to use this operation, let’s look at basic example. Imagine a cache of Person instances, each keyed by a PersonId , whose data originates in a separate data store. The following code shows the most common pattern of using putForExternalRead within the context of this example:

// Id of the person to look up, provided by the application
PersonId id = ...;

// Get a reference to the cache where person instances will be stored
Cache<PersonId, Person> cache = ...;

// First, check whether the cache contains the person instance
// associated with with the given id
Person cachedPerson = cache.get(id);

if (cachedPerson == null) {
   // The person is not cached yet, so query the data store with the id
   Person person = dataStore.lookup(id);

   // Cache the person along with the id so that future requests can
   // retrieve it from memory rather than going to the data store
   cache.putForExternalRead(id, person);
} else {
   // The person was found in the cache, so return it to the application
   return cachedPerson;
}

Note that putForExternalRead should never be used as a mechanism to update the cache with a new Person instance originating from application execution (i.e. from a transaction that modifies a Person’s address). When updating cached values, please use the standard put operation, otherwise the possibility of caching corrupt data is likely.

AdvancedCache advancedCache = cache.getAdvancedCache();

advancedCache.withFlags(Flag.CACHE_MODE_LOCAL, Flag.SKIP_LOCKING)
   .withFlags(Flag.FORCE_SYNCHRONOUS)
   .put("hello", "world");

Set<CompletableFuture<?>> futures = new HashSet<>();
futures.add(cache.putAsync(key1, value1)); // does not block
futures.add(cache.putAsync(key2, value2)); // does not block
futures.add(cache.putAsync(key3, value3)); // does not block

// the remote calls for the 3 puts will effectively be executed
// in parallel, particularly useful if running in distributed mode
// and the 3 keys would typically be pushed to 3 different nodes
// in the cluster

// check that the puts completed successfully
for (CompletableFuture<?> f: futures) f.get();