Get Started with Caching in Entity Framework (EF) Core using NCache

By Gowtham K

What is NCache?

NCache is an Open Source in-memory distributed cache for .NET, Java, and Node.js. NCache is extremely fast and linearly scalable and caches application data to reduce expensive database trips. Use NCache to remove performance bottlenecks related to your data storage and databases and scale your .NET, Java, and Node.js applications to extreme transaction processing (XTP).

What is EF Core?

The ADO.NET Entity Framework is a popular object-relational mapping framework. It provides abstraction from underlying relational data that is stored in a database and presents its conceptual schema to the application, preventing the need to write database persistence code.

Entity Framework Core is a lightweight and open source and cross platform framework to handle the high transaction applications where scalability and performance cannot be compromised. However, in such critical cases, the database quickly becomes a bottleneck as the database tier does not support adding on more servers. To achieve this scalability and reliability NCache provides extension methods for Entity Framework Core.

EFCore can serve as an object-relation mapper which eliminate the need of most of the data-access code, and it has been widely used to handle the high transactions .NET server applications (ASP.NET, Web Services, Microservices, and other server apps). Most of the time the application faces the scalability bottlenecks from database when there is high load from the network which can be easily eliminated by using the distributed caching inside EF Core. This blog will explain you how to integrate the NCache into EF Core.