Hi All,

Is write-behind cache support planned at any point for Hibernate?

I need to create a scoreboard system that could end up under heavy load - millions of rows, and a great deal of concurrency (although still 10:1 read:write ratio). I need to be able to post a score and store it's rank (so say a score of 1 million would be 1st place), however this will mean that after a score is posted any other 'below' it will need their rank column updated (so they all shift down one). This would lock out large parts of the table in any one transaction.

It seems more sensible to use a write-behind cache, so we just rewrite the entire table every X seconds, and so clients aren't exposed to any locking.

the hard aspect is to maintain consistency, so you can't just "plug in" a new strategy, that won't work.

we have something similar being built right now: http://community.jboss.org/wiki/OverviewofHibernateOGM

It's storing data in a transactional grid (Infinispan), so you get all the performance of a cache (as Infinispan can be used as a ultra fast cache as well) and in addition you get reliable and easy to setup clustering, you can dynamically add or remove nodes while the system stays up and working efficiently. Infinispan can be configured with a "write behind" backup to an alternative storage (A filesystem, a databse, Amazon S3, Cassandra, ... many more).

It's currently only supporting Infinispan but more key/value stores should come, especially if people contribute.