Smart (?) Database Cache - php

Question

I've seen several database cache engines, all of them are pretty dumb (i.e.: keep this query cached for X minutes) and require that you manually delete the whole cache repository after a INSERT / UPDATE / DELETE query has been executed.
About 2 or 3 years ago I developed an alternative DB cache system for a project I was working on, the idea was basically to use regular expressions to find the table(s) involved in a particular SQL query:
$query_patterns = array
(
'INSERT' => '/INTO\s+(\w+)\s+/i',
'SELECT' => '/FROM\s+((?:[\w]|,\s*)+)(?:\s+(?:[LEFT|RIGHT|OUTER|INNER|NATURAL|CROSS]\s*)*JOIN\s+((?:[\w]|,\s*)+)\s*)*/i',
'UPDATE' => '/UPDATE\s+(\w+)\s+SET/i',
'DELETE' => '/FROM\s+((?:[\w]|,\s*)+)/i',
'REPLACE' => '/INTO\s+(\w+)\s+/i',
'TRUNCATE' => '/TRUNCATE\s+(\w+)/i',
'LOAD' => '/INTO\s+TABLE\s+(\w+)/i',
);
I know that these regexs probably have some flaws (my regex skills were pretty green back then) and obviously don't match nested queries, but since I never use them that isn't a problem for me.
Anyway, after finding the involved tables I would alphabetically sort them and create a new folder in the cache repository with the following naming convention:
+table_a+table_b+table_c+table_...+
In case of a SELECT query, I would fetch the results from the database, serialize() them and store them in the appropriate cache folder, so for instance the results of the following query:
SELECT `table_a`.`title`, `table_b`.`description` FROM `table_a`, `table_b` WHERE `table_a`.`id` <= 10 ORDER BY `table_a`.`id` ASC;
Would be stored in:
/cache/+table_a+table_b+/079138e64d88039ab9cb2eab3b6bdb7b.md5
The MD5 being the query itself. Upon a consequent SELECT query the results would be trivial to fetch.
In case of any other type of write query (INSERT, REPLACE, UPDATE, DELETE and so on) I would glob() all the folders that had +matched_table(s)+ in their name all delete all the file contents. This way it wouldn't be necessary to delete the whole cache, just the cache used by the affected and related tables.
The system worked pretty well and the difference of performance was visible - although the project had many more read queries than write queries. Since then I started using transactions, FK CASCADE UPDATES / DELETES and never had the time to perfect the system to make it work with these features.
I've used MySQL Query Cache in the past but I must say the performance doesn't even compare.
I'm wondering: am I the only one who sees beauty in this system? Is there any bottlenecks I may not be aware of? Why do popular frameworks like CodeIgniter and Kohana (I'm not aware of Zend Framework) have such rudimentary DB cache systems?
More importantly, do you see this as a feature worth pursuing? If yes, is there anything I could do / use to make it even faster (my main concerns are disk I/O and (de)serialization of query results)?
I appreciate all input, thanks.

Answer 1

I can see the beauty in this solution, however, I belive it only works for a very specific set of applications. Scenarios where it is not applicable include:
Databases which utilize cascading deletes/updates or any kind of triggers. E.g., your DELETE to table A may cause a DELETE from table B. The regex will never catch this.
Accessing the database from points which do not go through you cache invalidation scheme, e.g. crontab scripts etc. If you ever decide to implement replication across machines (introduce read-only slaves), it may also disturb the cache (because it does not go through cache invalidation etc.)
Even if these scenarios are not realistic for your case it does still answer the question of why frameworks do not implement this kind of cache.
Regarding if this is worth pursuing, it all depends on your application. Maybe you care to supply more information?

Answer 2

The solution, as you describe it, is at risk for concurrency issues. When you're receiving hundreds of queries per second, you're bound to hit a case where an UPDATE statement runs, but before you can clear your cache, a SELECT reads from it, and gets stale data. Additionally, you may run in to issues when several UPDATEs hit the same set of rows in a short time period.
In a broader sense, best practice with caching is to cache the largest objects possible. E.g., rather than having a bunch of "user"-related rows cached all over the place, it's better to just cache the "user" object itself.
Even better, if you can cache whole pages (e.g., you show the same homepage to everyone; a profile page appears identical to almost everyone, etc.), that's even better. One cache fetch for a whole, pre-rendered page will dramatically outperform dozens of cache fetches for row/query level caches followed by re-rending the page.
Long story short: profile. If you take the time to do some measurement, you'll likely find that caching large objects, or even pages, rather than small queries used to build those things, is a huge performance win.

Answer 3

While I do see the beauty in this - especially for environments where resources are limited and can not easily be extended, like on shared hosting - I personally would fear complications in the future: What if somebody, newly hired and unaware of the caching mechanism, starts using nested queries? What if some external service starts updating the table, with the cache not noticing?
For a specialized, defined project that urgently needs a speedup that cannot be helped by adding processor power or RAM, this looks like a great solution. As a general component, I find it too shaky, and would fear subtle problems in the long run that stem from people forgetting that there is a cache to be aware of.

Answer 4

I suspect that the regexes may not provide for every case - certainly they don't seem to deal with the scenario of mixing base table names and the tables themselves. e.g. consider
update stats.measures set amount=50 where id=1;
and
use stats;
update measures set amount=50 where id=1;
Then there's PL/SQL.
Then there's the fact that it depends on every client opting in to an advisory control mechanism i.e. it pre-supposes that all the database access is from machines implementing the caching control mechanism on a shared filesystem.
(as a small point - wouldn't it be simpler to just check the modification times on the data files to determine if the cached version of a query on a defined set of tables is still current, rather then trying to identify if the cache control mechanism has spotted an update - it would certainly be a lot more robust)
Stepping back a bit, implementing this from scratch using a robust architecture would mean that all queries would have to be intercepted by the control mechanism. The control mechanism would probably need a more sophisticated query parser. It certainly requires a common storgae substrate for all the instances of the control mechanism. It probably needs an understanding of the data dictionary - all things which are already implemented by the database itself.
You state that "I've used MySQL Query Cache in the past but I must say the performance doesn't even compare."
I find this rather odd. Certainly when dealing with large result sets from queries, my experience is that loading the data into the heap from a database is a lot faster than unserializing large arrays - although large result sets are rather atypical of web based applications.
When I've tried to speed up database access (after fixing everything else of course) then I've gone down the route of replicating and partitioning data across multiple DBMS instances.
C.

Answer 5

This is related to the problem of session splitting when working with multiple databases in a master-slave configuration. Basically, a similar set of regular expressions are used to determine which tables (or even which rows) are being read from or written to. The system keeps track of which tables were written to and when, and when a read to one of those tables comes up, it's routed to the master. If a query is reading from a table whose data needn't be up-to-the-second accurate, then it's routed to the slave. Generally, information only really needs to be current when it's something a user changed themselves (i.e., editing a user's profile).
They talk about this a good bit in the O'Reilly book High Performance MySQL. I used it quite a bit when developing a system for handling session splits back in the day.

Answer 6

The improvement you describe is to avoid invalidating caches that are guaranteed to not have been affected by an update because they draw data from a different table.
That is of course nice, but I am not sure if it is fine-grained enough to make a real difference. You would still be invaliding lots of caches that did not really need to be (because the update was on the table, but on different rows).
Also, even this "simple" scheme relies on being able to detect the relevant tables by looking at the SQL query string. This can be difficult to do in the general case, because of views, table aliases, and multiple catalogs.
It is very difficult to automatically (and efficiently) detect whether a cache needs to be invalidated. Because of that, you can either use a very simple scheme (such as invalidating on every update, or per table, as in your system, which does not work too well when there are many updates), or a very hand-crafted cache for the specific application with deep hooks into the query logic (probably difficult to write and hard to maintain), or accept that the cache can contain stale data and just refresh it periodically.