Infinispan: Open Source is getting into the Data Grid Market

I came across Pawel Plaszczak blog post that describes a new product from JBoss named Infinispan (still in beta), which aims the data grid market (seems like things are getting warmer). Pawel also provided a deep comparison between Inifinspan and leading commercial products such as Oracle Coherence and Gigaspaces XAP.

This product is still in beta, and is missing features that exist in the commercial products, but it's worth to take a look on it,

Keep Performing!
Moshe Kaplan. RockeTier. The Performance Experts.

Hibernate Composite Keys Bug

Hi,

While working on the last few weeks on the last Gigaspaces XAP version, we were upset to find that it does not support composite keys (2 or more fields that serve as the table primary key) when using the default Hibernate connector.

When we investigated the issue, we found out that since Gigaspaces XAP is heavily relayed on Hibernate, and since Hibernate does not support this, Gigaspaces does not support this as well. UPDATE: Gigaspaces is not heavily relayed on Hibernate, rather than provides Hibernate as its default out of the box ORM mapping solution.

It seems that we are not the only one who suffers from this issue in Hibernate (see the error code: Expected positional parameter count: 1, actual parameters: [Parent@bec357b] [from Child this where this.id.parent = ?])

We are working on an applicative solution to solve this issue, but not found time yet to get deep into the Hibernate source code and solve this issue due time stress.

Hope somebody will solve that, before we'll get to it again :-)

UPDATE: Please notice the thread regarding this post which discuss Gigaspaces other external data sources, virtual fields, how to overcome this Hibernate composite keys limitation and their drawbacks.

Best Regards,
Moshe. RockeTier. The Performance Experts.

Gigaspaces XAP vs Oracle Coherence

Hi,

We analyse several Data Grid solutions these days inc. Oracle Coherence and Gigaspaces XAP. During the literature survey we noticed this interesting debate at The Server Side. Take a look in it if you want to know more, while we prepare our analysis.

Best,
Moshe, RockeTier, the performance experts

.NET Web Application Boosting

Hi,

We are involved these days in a large ASP.Net project for a new company in the online advertising field (Great company with a great innovative product, which I'll clearly present when time will come). The product includes both a large back office system, and an impressive real time/black box server system which is designed to support 200 million events per day (and counting).

I wanted to share several concepts we are using in order to boost their system and reach these numbers:
1. Using a grid infrastructure - we are using Gigaspaces XAP. This is a great product, which enables us reaching 20 Million events per day on a single commodity server and achieve linear growth. Since our customer is a startup, it is registered to Gigaspaces startup program, meaning it gets the product free out of charge.
2. Using custom http handlers - this technique enables creating a class library assembly that can be linked directly to, without going through a standard .aspx page. This method reaches 5-10% boost over the standard ASPX method.
3. Using async pages - This method turns the regular syncronized ASPX web pages into async ones. Why is it so important? since even interactive web pages may include calls to relatively time consuming methods like reading/storing files on disk or consuming web services. In these cases the request will wait in the thread pool till the time consuming method will finish its job. The result is clear: preventing another web requests to be handled. Async pages releases the bottleneck by processing these time consuming methods in another thread pool. By doing that, it enables us serving more requests on a single server. Read some more at: Pluralsight, ASP.NET Resources blog and this one.

Have a great weekend,
Moshe
RockeTier