Improving Data Access of J2EE Applications by Exploiting Asynchronous Messaging and Caching Services
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 2002), Hong Kong, China, August 20--23, 2002, page 574--585. VLDB Endowment, Morgan Kaufmann, (2002)Acceptance Rate (Full Paper): 14\% <b>Best-Paper-Award Nomination</b>.Abstract
The J2EE platform provides a variety of options for making business data persistent using DBMS technology. However, the integration with existing backend database systems has proven to be of crucial importance for the scalability and performance of J2EE applications, because modern e-business systems are extremely data-intensive. As a result, the data access layer, and the link between the application server and the database server in particular, are very susceptible to turning into a system bottleneck. In this paper we use the ECperf benchmark as an example of a realistic application in order to illustrate the problems mentioned above and discuss how they could be approached and eliminated. In particular, we show how asynchronous, message-based processing could be exploited to reduce the load on the DBMS and improve system performance, scalability and reliability. Furthermore, we discuss the major issues related to the correct use of entity beans (the components provided by J2EE for modelling persistent data) and present a number of methods to optimize their performance utilizing caching mechanisms. We have evaluated the proposed techniques through measurements and have documented the performance gains that they provide.
