Preface

Relational database solutions have dominated the IT industry since the '80s. Over the last decade, relational databases have been losing its preference and importance for NoSQL databases and in-memory data grids.

There are many reasons involved in the decay of popularity, such as the fixed schema model, difficulties in scaling, and the centralized design that requires a heavy disk I/O for high write workloads.

Now, with the advent of big data and cloud computing technologies, enterprise systems have to deal with large data sets pushing pushing its products to a new level, allowing businesses to reduce costs and distribute their data across multiple channels and applications.

Infinispan is an in-memory data grid and can help solve these challenges. It supports dynamic scalability and provides excellent performance for applications that require exposing and distributing data. Infinispan is an open source Java application that exposes a Cache interface that extends the java.util.Map interface, which can optionally distribute the cache data across a cluster.

This book will cover all aspects about Infinispan, from installation to tuning tips, and important concepts related to Distributed Transactions, Session Management, Map/Reduce, Topologies, and Data Access Patterns.