Caching and Session state management using Microsoft Velocity and Memcached

Question

I was looking at Microsoft Velocity and memcached to find a solution for some session management issues -

What is the difference between caching that is provided by Microsoft Velocity, memcached and session state management? I mean memcached and microsoft veolocity provide distributed caching capabilities... so using these to store session state would mean that session state would also be distributed .. Am i right in this assumption

Answer 1

The difference between caching an session state management is that caching is at the application level(caches data for all sessions). Also cache can timeout many times during a session. Use cache for holding frequently used information(i.e information from a lookup table). This way your application wont have to access your data source unnecessarily.