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External Storage

Overview

You can use GridGain as a caching layer on top of an existing database such as an RDBMS or NoSQL databases, for example, Apache Cassandra or MongoDB. This use case accelerates the underlying database by employing in-memory processing.

GridGain provides an out-of-the-box integration with Apache Cassandra. For other NoSQL databases for which integration is not available off-the-shelf, you can provide your own implementation of the CacheStore interface.

The two main use cases where an external storage can be used include:

  • A caching layer to an existing database. In this scenario, you can dramatically improve the processing speed by loading data into memory. You can also bring SQL support to a database that does not have it (when all data is loaded into memory).

  • You want to persist the data in an external database (instead of using the native persistence).

3rd party persistence

The CacheStore interface extends both javax.cache.integration.CacheLoader and javax.cache.integration.CacheWriter, which are used for read-through and write-through features respectively. You can also implement each of the interfaces individually and provide them to the cache configuration separately.

Read-Through and Write-Through

Read-through means that the data is read from the underlying persistent store if it is not available in the cache. Note that this is true only for get operations made through the key-value API; SELECT queries never read through data from the external database. To execute select queries, the data must be pre-loaded from the database into the cache by calling the loadCache() method.

Write-through means that the data is automatically persisted when it is updated in the cache. All read-through and write-through operations participate in cache transactions and are committed or rolled back as a whole.

Write-Behind Caching

In a simple write-through mode, each put and remove operation involves a corresponding request to the persistent store; therefore, the overall duration of the update operation might be relatively long. Additionally, an intensive cache update rate can cause an extremely high storage load.

For such cases, you can enable the write-behind mode, in which update operations are performed asynchronously. The key concept of this approach is to accumulate updates and asynchronously flush them to the underlying database as a bulk operation. You can trigger flushing of data based on time-based events (the maximum time that data entry can reside in the queue is limited), queue-size events (the queue is flushed when its size reaches some particular point), or both of them (whichever occurs first).

With the write-behind approach, only the last update to an entry is written to the underlying storage. If a cache entry with a key named key1 is sequentially updated with values value1, value2, and value3 respectively, then only a single store request for the (key1, value3) pair is propagated to the persistent store.

RDBMS Integration

To use an RDBMS as an underlying storage, you can use one of the following implementations of CacheStore.

  • CacheJdbcPojoStore — stores objects as a set of fields using reflection. Use this implementation if you are adding GridGain on top of an existing database and want to use specific fields (or all of them) from the underlying table.

  • CacheJdbcBlobStore — stores objects in the underlying database in the Blob format. This option is useful in scenarios when you use an external database as a persistent storage and want to store your data in a simple format.

Below are configuration examples for both implementations of CacheStore.

CacheJdbcPojoStore

With CacheJdbcPojoStore, you can store objects as a set of fields and can configure the mapping between table columns and objects fields via the configuration.

  1. Set the CacheConfiguration.cacheStoreFactory property to org.apache.ignite.cache.store.jdbc.CacheJdbcPojoStoreFactory and provide the following properties:

    • dataSourceBean — database connection credentials: URL, user, password.

    • dialect — the class that implements the SQL dialect compatible with your database. GridGain provides out-of-the-box implementations for MySQL, Oracle, H2, SQLServer, and DB2 databases. These dialects can be found in the org.apache.ignite.cache.store.jdbc.dialect package of the GridGain distribution.

    • types — this property is required to define mappings between the database table and the corresponding POJO (see POJO configuration example below).

  2. Optionally, configure query entities if you want to execute SQL queries on the cache.

The following example demonstrates how to configure a GridGain cache on top of a MySQL table. The table has 2 columns: id (INTEGER) and name (VARCHAR), which are mapped to objects of the Person class.

You can configure CacheJdbcPojoStore via both the XML configuration and Java code.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans" xmlns:util="http://www.springframework.org/schema/util" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="         http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans              http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd              http://www.springframework.org/schema/util              http://www.springframework.org/schema/util/spring-util.xsd">
    <!-- Data source bean -->
    <bean class="com.mysql.cj.jdbc.MysqlDataSource" id="mysqlDataSource">
        <property name="URL" value="jdbc:mysql://[host]:[port]/[database]"/>
        <property name="user" value="YOUR_USER_NAME"/>
        <property name="password" value="YOUR_PASSWORD"/>
    </bean>
    <!-- Ignite Configuration -->
    <bean class="org.apache.ignite.configuration.IgniteConfiguration">
        <property name="cacheConfiguration">
            <list>
                <!-- Configuration for PersonCache -->
                <bean class="org.apache.ignite.configuration.CacheConfiguration">
                    <property name="name" value="PersonCache"/>
                    <property name="cacheMode" value="PARTITIONED"/>
                    <property name="atomicityMode" value="ATOMIC"/>
                    <property name="cacheStoreFactory">
                        <bean class="org.apache.ignite.cache.store.jdbc.CacheJdbcPojoStoreFactory">
                            <property name="dataSourceBean" value="mysqlDataSource"/>
                            <property name="dialect">
                                <bean class="org.apache.ignite.cache.store.jdbc.dialect.MySQLDialect"/>
                            </property>
                            <property name="types">
                                <list>
                                    <bean class="org.apache.ignite.cache.store.jdbc.JdbcType">
                                        <property name="cacheName" value="PersonCache"/>
                                        <property name="keyType" value="java.lang.Integer"/>
                                        <property name="valueType" value="com.gridgain.pgarg.model.Person"/>
                                        <!--Specify the schema if applicable -->
                                        <!--property name="databaseSchema" value="MY_DB_SCHEMA"/-->
                                        <property name="databaseTable" value="PERSON"/>
                                        <property name="keyFields">
                                            <list>
                                                <bean class="org.apache.ignite.cache.store.jdbc.JdbcTypeField">
                                                    <constructor-arg>
                                                        <util:constant static-field="java.sql.Types.INTEGER"/>
                                                    </constructor-arg>
                                                    <constructor-arg value="id"/>
                                                    <constructor-arg value="int"/>
                                                    <constructor-arg value="id"/>
                                                </bean>
                                            </list>
                                        </property>
                                        <property name="valueFields">
                                            <list>
                                                <bean class="org.apache.ignite.cache.store.jdbc.JdbcTypeField">
                                                    <constructor-arg>
                                                        <util:constant static-field="java.sql.Types.INTEGER"/>
                                                    </constructor-arg>
                                                    <constructor-arg value="id"/>
                                                    <constructor-arg value="int"/>
                                                    <constructor-arg value="id"/>
                                                </bean>
                                                <bean class="org.apache.ignite.cache.store.jdbc.JdbcTypeField">
                                                    <constructor-arg>
                                                        <util:constant static-field="java.sql.Types.VARCHAR"/>
                                                    </constructor-arg>
                                                    <constructor-arg value="name"/>
                                                    <constructor-arg value="java.lang.String"/>
                                                    <constructor-arg value="name"/>
                                                </bean>
                                            </list>
                                        </property>
                                    </bean>
                                </list>
                            </property>
                        </bean>
                    </property>
                    <property name="readThrough" value="true"/>
                    <property name="writeThrough" value="true"/>
                    <!-- Configure query entities if you want to use SQL queries -->
                    <property name="queryEntities">
                        <list>
                            <bean class="org.apache.ignite.cache.QueryEntity">
                                <property name="keyType" value="java.lang.Integer"/>
                                <property name="valueType" value="com.gridgain.pgarg.model.Person"/>
                                <property name="keyFieldName" value="id"/>
                                <property name="keyFields">
                                    <list>
                                        <value>id</value>
                                    </list>
                                </property>
                                <property name="fields">
                                    <map>
                                        <entry key="name" value="java.lang.String"/>
                                        <entry key="id" value="java.lang.Integer"/>
                                    </map>
                                </property>
                            </bean>
                        </list>
                    </property>
                </bean>
                <!-- Provide similar configurations for other caches/tables -->
            </list>
        </property>
    </bean>
</beans>
IgniteConfiguration igniteCfg = new IgniteConfiguration();

CacheConfiguration<Integer, Person> personCacheCfg = new CacheConfiguration<>();

personCacheCfg.setName("PersonCache");
personCacheCfg.setCacheMode(CacheMode.PARTITIONED);
personCacheCfg.setAtomicityMode(CacheAtomicityMode.ATOMIC);

personCacheCfg.setReadThrough(true);
personCacheCfg.setWriteThrough(true);

CacheJdbcPojoStoreFactory<Integer, Person> factory = new CacheJdbcPojoStoreFactory<>();
factory.setDialect(new MySQLDialect());
factory.setDataSourceFactory((Factory<DataSource>)() -> {
    MysqlDataSource mysqlDataSrc = new MysqlDataSource();
    mysqlDataSrc.setURL("jdbc:mysql://[host]:[port]/[database]");
    mysqlDataSrc.setUser("YOUR_USER_NAME");
    mysqlDataSrc.setPassword("YOUR_PASSWORD");
    return mysqlDataSrc;
});

JdbcType personType = new JdbcType();
personType.setCacheName("PersonCache");
personType.setKeyType(Integer.class);
personType.setValueType(Person.class);
// Specify the schema if applicable
// personType.setDatabaseSchema("MY_DB_SCHEMA");
personType.setDatabaseTable("PERSON");

personType.setKeyFields(new JdbcTypeField(java.sql.Types.INTEGER, "id", Integer.class, "id"));

personType.setValueFields(new JdbcTypeField(java.sql.Types.INTEGER, "id", Integer.class, "id"),
                          new JdbcTypeField(java.sql.Types.VARCHAR, "name", String.class, "name"));

factory.setTypes(personType);

personCacheCfg.setCacheStoreFactory(factory);

QueryEntity qryEntity = new QueryEntity();

qryEntity.setKeyType(Integer.class.getName());
qryEntity.setValueType(Person.class.getName());
qryEntity.setKeyFieldName("id");

Set<String> keyFields = new HashSet<>();
keyFields.add("id");
qryEntity.setKeyFields(keyFields);

LinkedHashMap<String, String> fields = new LinkedHashMap<>();
fields.put("id", "java.lang.Integer");
fields.put("name", "java.lang.String");

qryEntity.setFields(fields);

personCacheCfg.setQueryEntities(Collections.singletonList(qryEntity));

igniteCfg.setCacheConfiguration(personCacheCfg);
Person Class
class Person implements Serializable {
    private static final long serialVersionUID = 0L;

    private int id;

    private String name;

    public Person() {
    }

    public String getName() {
        return name;
    }

    public void setName(String name) {
        this.name = name;
    }

    public int getId() {
        return id;
    }

    public void setId(int id) {
        this.id = id;
    }
}

CacheJdbcBlobStore

CacheJdbcBlobStore stores objects in the underlying database in the blob format. It creates a table named 'ENTRIES', with the akey and val columns (both have the binary type).

You can change the default table definition by providing a custom create table query and DML queries used to load, delete, and update the data. Refer to CacheJdbcBlobStore for details.

In the example below, the objects of the Person class are stored as an array of bytes in a single column.

<bean id="mysqlDataSource" class="com.mysql.jdbc.jdbc2.optional.MysqlDataSource">
  <property name="URL" value="jdbc:mysql://[host]:[port]/[database]"/>
  <property name="user" value="YOUR_USER_NAME"/>
  <property name="password" value="YOUR_PASSWORD"/>
</bean>

<bean id="ignite.cfg" class="org.apache.ignite.configuration.IgniteConfiguration">
   <property name="cacheConfiguration">
     <list>
       <bean class="org.apache.ignite.configuration.CacheConfiguration">
           <property name="name" value="PersonCache"/>
           <property name="cacheStoreFactory">
             <bean class="org.apache.ignite.cache.store.jdbc.CacheJdbcBlobStoreFactory">
               <property name="dataSourceBean" value = "mysqlDataSource" />
             </bean>
           </property>
       </bean>
      </list>
    </property>
</bean>
IgniteConfiguration igniteCfg = new IgniteConfiguration();

CacheConfiguration<Integer, Person> personCacheCfg = new CacheConfiguration<>();
personCacheCfg.setName("PersonCache");

CacheJdbcBlobStoreFactory<Integer, Person> cacheStoreFactory = new CacheJdbcBlobStoreFactory<>();

cacheStoreFactory.setUser("USER_NAME");

MysqlDataSource mysqlDataSrc = new MysqlDataSource();
mysqlDataSrc.setURL("jdbc:mysql://[host]:[port]/[database]");
mysqlDataSrc.setUser("USER_NAME");
mysqlDataSrc.setPassword("PASSWORD");

cacheStoreFactory.setDataSource(mysqlDataSrc);

personCacheCfg.setCacheStoreFactory(cacheStoreFactory);

personCacheCfg.setWriteThrough(true);
personCacheCfg.setReadThrough(true);

igniteCfg.setCacheConfiguration(personCacheCfg);
This API is not presently available for C#/.NET. You can use XML configuration.
This API is not presently available for C++. You can use XML configuration.

Loading Data

After you configure the cache store and start the cluster, load the data from the database into your cluster as follows:

// Load data from person table into PersonCache.
IgniteCache<Integer, Person> personCache = ignite.cache("PersonCache");

personCache.loadCache(null);

NoSQL Database Integration

You can integrate GridGain with any NoSQL database by implementing the CacheStore interface.

Cassandra Integration

GridGain provides an out-of-the-box implementation of CacheStore that enables you to use Apache Cassandra as a persistent storage. This implementation utilizes Cassandra’s asynchronous queries to provide high performance batch operations such as loadAll(), writeAll() and deleteAll(), and automatically creates all necessary tables and namespaces in Cassandra.