Can Databases Replace Caches Entirely?
2025-08-31
This post explores the possibility of databases completely replacing caches. While databases offer some caching capabilities like buffer pools and read replicas, caches excel at low-latency data access, especially for specific data subsets and pre-computed data. To replace caches, databases need to address several challenges: efficiently handling numerous read replicas, enabling partial read replicas, prioritizing specific data, and implementing efficient incremental view maintenance (IVM). The author suggests that combining IVM with partial read replicas might eventually allow databases to partially replace caches, but a gap remains.
(avi.im)
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