Introduction
In simple terms data caching is storing data in memory for quick access. Typically information that is costly to obtain (in terms of performance) is stored in the cache. One of the more common items stored in a cache in a Web application environment is commonly displayed database values; by caching such information, rather than relying on repeated database calls, the demand on the Web server and database server's system resources are decreased and the Web application's scalability increased. As Microsoft eloquently puts it, "Caching is a technique widely used in computing to increase performance by keeping frequently accessed or expensive data in memory. In the context of a Web application, caching is used to retain pages or data across HTTP requests and reuse them without the expense of recreating them."
In classic ASP we didn't have anything nearly as sophisticated nor as powerful as the ASP.NET caching API that is now available to us. With .NET we have the ability to cache whole pages (output caching), parts of pages or server controls (fragment caching) and data caching with the lower-level Cache API.
In this article I will be examining data caching in detail. For more information on output caching see Page Output Caching from the ASP.NET QuickStarts. For more information on fragment caching, see Page Fragment Caching from the ASP.NET QuickStarts.
This article was originally published on 4guysfromrolla.com.