Music, Politics and Code
{ Monthly Archives }
Hey everyone, I’m at CFUNITED this week! This is my first brush with the CF community - stop by the Adobe booth and say hello if you’re here. I’d love to hear more firsthand accounts of how you’re using CF, and what you’d like to see us do in our upcoming release.
This is the first in a series of posts where I’ll discuss caching techniques, and how we apply them in ColdFusion.
So, what is a cache?
A cache in software terms means exactly the same as it does in any English dictionary, at least in the sense that it’s a store of items. More specifically, it’s often intended to mean a store of items that are kept in memory for fast access. Which brings us to our next question…
Why cache at all?
Consider that database table you have in your application, the one that is almost never changed, the one that you spend 99% of your time reading from, and only 1% of your time writing to. Do you really need to pay the cost of running the query against your database server each time? How about we just keep it in memory and so provide almost instantaneous access to the data.
Welcome to Stake Five, my new home on the web, my virtual stake in the ground! I’ll be updating it as frequently as I can, with musings on technology, music, politics, and whatever else might catch my fancy.
In case you’re wondering where the name came from, my lovely wife is to blame - she suggested munging something to do with music, and this is what popped out…
While the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Take Five may indeed be one of the most overplayed jazz tunes ever (a saxophonist friend of mine claims that a little bit of him dies every time he hears it!), there is an undeniable magic to the original, which I revisited after reading Tim Bray’s post on it a few weeks ago. If you’re reading this, Tim, thanks for the reminder! When I was getting into playing jazz, it was definitely one of those formative tunes that helped guide the way I thought about music - apart from the wonderful original, Aziza Mustafa Zadeh’s magnificent cover in particular got me thinking about how original forms can be stretched to accommodate the new.
And so I hope to do here as well - we stand on the shoulders of giants, after all!
