Syncing Cache In ADO.NET Using NCache In .NET 6 With SQL Server

By Thiago Vivas

This article will explain how to sync cache in your ADO.NET application using .NET 6 with SQL Server and will be given a practical example of how you could take advantage of having your ADO.NET requests cached by NCache. Cache Synchronization here may have two meanings that are very different from one another. We can synchronize cache by just removing the item from the database, so when the cache is requested it is going to be null, forcing a new request to the database in order to get fresh data. Or, cache synchronization can also mean that, as the data in the database is updated, then NCache is going to manage its cache update in order to have the cached item always up to date with the data source.

The practical example will be taking advantage of the NorthWind database in SQL Server, written in a console application using C# with .NET 6. NCache will be used to manage the cache synchronization and most of its features will be presented working with practical examples.

Northwind is a populated sample database commonly used when we need to access data, sparing us some time without needing to create and populate a database from scratch.

What is ADO.NET?

ADO.NET, whereas the ADO stands for Activex Data Object, is part of the .NET Framework and has a set of classes and connectors providing access to relational, XML, and application data. ADO.NET used to be the main bridge between our applications and their databases before object-relational mappers like Entity Framework were released.

Nowadays ADO.NET is used in more specific scenarios due to its powerful engine to access a variety of data sources, alongside ADO.NET's easy way to manipulate data.