Happy 2013 everyone!
I'm very much excited this year and is in the initial stages of ramping up design plans for the next version of Scalable Object Persistence (SOP) framework, which includes siginificant feature support for Enterprise data caching, e.g. - EF 2nd level caching adapter/solution. For those who want to get familiarized with SOP, pls. feel free to browse around, get source code and trial SOP in this link:http://sop.codeplex.com/. It is Open sourced as well.
Anyway, let me jump straight to the point, "we" (the community including the EF team) do need a good story in order to create proposals of what a good 2nd level caching provider designs need to be. Since today there is an opportunity to get community feedback of what is needed when it comes to the future EF 2nd level caching support AND SOP has this feature included in its next version, I was encouraged by EF team representative to start a blog/discussion here so we can exchange ideas and in process, gather requirements with hopes of taking it to the next level and be able to generate a good feature list and design propositions. (pls. see this link for add'l details on EF 2nd level caching plan/initial community feedback: http://data.uservoice.com/forums/72025-entity-framework-feature-suggestions/suggestions/1015353-support-for-second-level-cache)
If you may, I'll start with a short list of high level User Stories and Use Cases for this EF 2nd level caching:
1. As a developer authoring application solutions using EF, I would like to have an option to easily enable a 2nd level caching provider to improve my application overall data I/O performance.
2. As a developer authoring a 2nd level caching provider, I would like to easily be able to implement a provider without being tied to the initial target version of EF that supports this 2nd level caching provider, and without being required to understand the innards of Entity Framework and any of its supported data sources.
3. As a technical director or enterprise architect, I would like to be able to drive overall performance throughput of my enterprise applications/solutions by designing a good topology/layout structure of my servers, network cabling and the software pieces (applications & DB layout).
These user stories can be expanded with a lot of details from the community. Pls. feel free to provide your feedback (I'll add mine later as well) and so we can gather what is needed, "influence" and/or work with EF team to generate a good 2nd level caching provider model/API set, THEN we can start seeing quality solutions for EF 2nd level data caching. In SOP, so I can work with the community and SOP developers in generating/expanding SOP's EF 2nd level caching support.
Thank you very much,
-Gerardo Recinto