High performance product catalog in asp.net?

Question

Hi, I am planning a high performance e-commerce project in asp.net and need help in selecting the optimal data retrieval model for the product catalog.

Some details, - products in 10-20 categories- 1000-5000 products in every category - products listed with name, price, brand and image, 15-40 on every page - products needs to be listed without table-tags - product info in 2-4 tables that will be joined together (product images not stored in db) - webserver and sql database on different hardware - ms sql 2005 on shared db-server (pretty bad performance to start with...) - enable users to search products combining different criteria such as pricerange, brand, with/without image.

My questions are, - what technique shall I use to retrieve the products? - what technique shall I use to present the products? - what cache strategy do you recomend? - how do I solve filtering, sortering, pageing in the most efficient way? - do you have any recomendations for more reading on this subject?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Let the SQL server retrive the data. With fairly good indexing the SQL server should be able to cope.

in SQL 2005 you can do paging in results, that way you have less data to shuffle back and forth.

Answer 2

I think you will end up with a lot of text searching. Give a try for either lucene or Solr ( http server on top of lucene). CNET developed solr for their product catalog search.

Answer 3

Have you thought about looking at an existing shopping cart platform that allows you to purchase the source code?

I've used www.aspdotnetstorefront.com

They have lots of examples of major e-commerce stores running on this platform. I built www.ElegantAppliance.com on this platform. Several thousand products, over 100 categories/sub-categories.

Answer 4

Make sure your database design is normalised as much as possible - use lookup tables where necessary to make sure you are not repeating data unnecessarily.

Store your images on the server filesystem and store a relative (not full) path reference to them in the database.

Use stored procedures for as much as possible, and always retrieve the least amount of data as you can from the server to help with memory and network traffic efficiencies.

Don't bother with caching, your database should be fast enough to produce results immediately, and if not, make it faster.

Answer 5

Take a look at the Duwamish example project (download page) from Microsoft. It's a little old so there is no linq in the project, but it makes a great use of ADO.Net and ASP User Controls capabilities.