Classifying e-commerce workloads under dynamic caching

In an e-commerce system, the database server performance is crucial. Dynamic caching is often used to reduce the load on the database server, which reduces the need for scalability within the server itself. A good understanding of the workload characteristics of the database server in an e-commerce environment is important to the design, tuning, and capacity planning. Using dynamic caching can dramatically alter the characteristics of requests that the database server receives, changing the dominant operations, even the workload type. The two major database workload classifications are online analytical processing and online transaction processing. Allocations for resources such as main memory can be very different, depending on the workload type. We investigate the e-commerce activity profiles resulting from dynamic caching. We find that dynamic caching does tend to alter the behavior towards transaction processing.