DEV

080731 - DEV R&D

Eclipse Flash Development
http://fdt.powerflasher.com/products/fdt-30/enterprise/


Terracotta White Paper
Scratch Data and Network Attached Memory

Scratch data is transient data that only has value while a workflow is incomplete. Applications are running rampant with it.
Here’s a real world example of scratch data that’s easy to understand. You can image a math test where you choose from multiple
choice answers, ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’ or ‘D’. Perhaps the scratch paper you use to arrive at the answer is not collected by the teacher at the
end of the test, and it therefore never becomes part of the official results, but without the scratch paper, you can’t take the test.
Furthermore, if you had to fill in a multiple choice form that somehow described all of your interim calculations, you might not be
able to complete the test in time!
Many of the applications that have scratch data today are operating in a load-balanced manner and are typically spread out across
more than one hardware machine / JVM. As a result of spreading the application across JVMs / servers, the scratch data inside
a lot of these applications is getting shoved into the database just in case traffic is routed incorrectly or in case a node fails. The
image below shows the problem graphically.
http://www.infoq.com/


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