Deciding When to Use Cached Updates

Go Up to Working with Cached Updates

Cached updates are primarily intended to reduce data access contention on remote database servers by:

• Minimizing transaction times.
• Minimizing network traffic.

While cached updates can minimize transaction times and drastically reduce network traffic, they may not be appropriate for all database client applications that work with remote servers. There are three areas of consideration when deciding to use cached updates:

• Cached data is local to your application, and is not under transaction control. In a busy client/server environment this has two implications for your application:

• Other applications can access and change the actual data on the server while your users edit their local copies of the data.
• Other applications cannot see any data changes made by your application until it applies all its changes.

• In master/detail relationships managing the order of applying cached updates can be tricky. This is particularly true when there are nested master/detail relationships where one detail table is the master table for yet another detail table and so on.
• Applying cached updates to read-only, query-based datasets requires use of update objects.

The InterBase Express components provide cached update methods and transaction control methods you can use in your application code to handle these situations, but you must take care that you cover all possible scenarios your application is likely to encounter in your working environment.