Object Caching in a Transactional, Object-Relational CORBA Environment

The OMG's CORBA and CORBA services like the OTS are a technology standard that enable the building of transactional systems running in d istributed and h eterogeneous environments. In large-scale CORBA systems that i ntegrate relational databases, ho wever, careful attention must be paid to n etwork traffic a nd the number of I/O-operations (like database access) performed, as these can degrade system performance significantly. Caching is a well-known concept t o improve performance in e.g. d atabase systems. Caching in a transactional object-relational CORBA environment has, ho wever, no t been studied in the literature so far. This thesis investigates concepts to improve performance a nd reliability in large-scale CORBA systems. An ob ject caching strategy for transactional, ob ject-relational CORBA systems is developed. It employs distributed transaction management t o replicate data, and asynchronous multicast notifications to upd ate cac hes that are distributed to load b alanced servers. The cac hing strategy is implemented and tested u sing a ca se study with real-world assumptions, and described as a generic, software architectural abstraction that can be reused in d ifferent CORBA system developments. Using the cac hing strategy proposed, the performance of the system can be drastically increased, and system scalability and reliability be well improved.