Yesterday, Terracotta introduced Ehcache Search (see the press release), which is built upon their leading enterprise data cache product, Ehcache. Terracotta helps Java developers get the most in terms of scalability, performance, and latency for their data-intensive enterprise applications. Whether you're caching data from a database, a REST-based web service, or other system, Terracotta has solutions that, many times, simply plug-in with very little configuration, and just work.

With more and more customers caching larger amounts of data, Terracotta released BigMemory, which can store hundreds of gigabytes of data in memory, but outside of the Java heap to avoid Java garbage collection issues. In turn, Terracotta's customers have been caching more and more data and, in many cases, entire databases worth of data are stored in memory. This has begged the question, is it possible to perform basic queries against the cached data instead of the database itself, to further improve performance? With Ehcache Search, the answer is yes!

To implement this solution, Terracotta simply extended the Ehcache API and has included the feature in their latest version, v2.4. It's not a new product or additional plug-in that requires an additional purchase, but is instead available to existing Terracotta customers. The new API and other attributes of the cache now make it possible to perform search-like queries against the database data in memory, as opposed to hitting the actual database and its disk-backed storage each time.

If you're an existing Ehcache user, simply upgrade to version 2.4, which is released as open-source software, with commercial licensing and support available if you require. To get the most in terms of performance and scalability, Terracotta offers Enterprise Ehcache with BigMemory that allows for low-latency and high-scalability with extremely large caches, which can further be distributed across servers.

If you're not currently an Ehcache user, you can join the millions of Java developers who are by checking out Terracotta's open-source offerings at http://www.ehcache.org/.

Happy Coding! -EJB