JPA with Multiple Servers

Question

I am currently working on a project that uses JPA (Toplink, currently) for its persistence. Currently, we are running a single application server, but, for redundancy, we would like to add a load balancer and another application sever (and possibly more as it grows).

First, I'm running into the issue of JPA caching. Since two processes will be updating the same database, the JPA cache returns the cached value rather than going to the database. I see how to turn that off, and the database itself implements a level of caching. Is turning off the cache completely the way to go here? I see the ways to tell JPA to always get from the database at a query level, but in a multi-server environment, it seems that you'll always want that to happen.

Along with this specific question, I'm interested in anyone out there who has implemented a JPA solution with multiple application servers and what problems arose during the implementation (and any suggestions you have).

Thanks much.

Answer 1

As you have found, you can disable the shared cache, see http://wiki.eclipse.org/EclipseLink/Examples/JPA/Caching or http://wiki.eclipse.org/EclipseLink/FAQ/How_to_disable_the_shared_cache%3F

There are also other options available in EclipseLink depending on your data and requirements.

A list of option include:

1. Disable shared cache

2. Enable cache coordination (see, http://www.eclipse.org/eclipselink/api/2.1/org/eclipse/persistence/config/PersistenceUnitProperties.html#COORDINATION_PROTOCOL)

3. Set a cache invalidation timeout (see, http://www.eclipse.org/eclipselink/api/2.1/org/eclipse/persistence/annotations/Cache.html#expiry%28%29)

4. Enable optimistic locking, this will ensure that any stale object cannot be updated, when an update on stale data occurs it will fail, and EclipseLink will automatically invalidate the object in the cache.

5. Investigate the Oracle TopLink integration of EclipseLink and Oracle Coherence to provide a distributed cache.

See also, http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Java_Persistence/Caching#Caching_in_a_Cluster

There is no perfect solution, the solution used normally depend on the data/class, normally an application has a set of read-only classes, read-mostly classes and write mostly classes. Personally I would enable the cache for the read-only with a 1 day timeout, enable the cache with cache coordination for the read-mostly, and disable the cache for the write mostly.