I am right now in Microsoft Project “Velocity” talk in PDC2008 by Muralidhar Krishnaprasad. Microsoft has been promising a distributed (and in-memory) cache system for a long long time. If I remember right it was first talked about in COM/ASP days. After that in every Microsoft event a version of it was shown (by a different team each time) in pre-release stages, but none of them got released. The story from Microsoft on the need for one, how to solve it and roadmap kept changing all the time. As for me, having got tired of this I have been using SQL Server as the distributed cache for few years now.
Notes from the session:
- “Velocity” is Microsoft’s Distributed Cache .
- Usage scenarios are: Reference Data, Vendor Catalogs, Activity Data, Resource Data (Flight Seat Inventory and like)
- It is an explicit, in-memory, distributed cache
- Any .NET Objects that can be serialized can be cached
- Scale very easily, add as much memory and add as much machines as you can
- Velocity is going to be free and released in MSDN
- Runs on standard Windows PC. If machines go down, the data is preserved and not lost. High Availability (HA) is ensured
- Velocity releases: CTP2 now in PDC, CTP3 in Mix ’09 and release at Mid ’09 timeframe
- In V1.0 simple Add queries can be done. In later versions LINQ queries will be available.
You can read more on the CTP2 that got released today from the Velocity blog post here .
With what we were shown today of Velocity, especially its high availability, monitoring tools, ease of use and scalability are pretty impressive. I just hope this time they ship this and not go the previous paths.
Hi,
it was good to read about velocity in your blog. we where thinking of using velocity on trial basis in one of our application, but faced few network and consistency issues with velocity.
i am hoping that all this minor bugs will be rectified by ms in there ctp3.
thanks again for sharing information on velocity.
Do let me know if there is any specific group within msft which I can contact for getting any help on velocity. i was not able to get any answer for my question which I had posted in msft velocity blog
Although Velocity has made progress from CTP1 to CTP2, it still leaves much to be desired. It will be some time before they provide all the important features in a distributed cache and even longer before it is tested in the market. I wish them good luck.
In the meantime, NCache already provides all CTP2 & V1, and many more features. NCache is the first, the most mature, and the most feature-rich distributed cache in the .NET space. NCache is an enterprise level in-memory distributed cache for .NET and also provides a distributed ASP.NET Session State. Check it out at http://www.alachisoft.com.
NCache Express is a totally free version of NCache. Check it out at http://www.alachisoft.com/rp.php?dest=/ncache/ncache_express.html.