Advanced prefetching and caching of models with PrefetchML

Caching and prefetching techniques have been used for decades in database engines and file systems to improve the performance of I/O-intensive application. A prefetching algorithm typically benefits from the system’s latencies by loading into main memory elements that will be needed in the future, speeding up data access. While these solutions can bring a significant improvement in terms of execution time, prefetching rules are often defined at the data level, making them hard to understand, maintain, and optimize. In addition, low-level prefetching and caching components are difficult to align with scalable model persistence frameworks because they are unaware of potential optimizations relying on the analysis of metamodel-level information and are less present in NoSQL databases, a common solution to store large models. To overcome this situation, we propose PrefetchML, a framework that executes prefetching and caching strategies over models. Our solution embeds a DSL to configure precisely the prefetching rules to follow and a monitoring component providing insights on how the prefetching execution is working to help designers optimize his performance plans. Our experiments show that PrefetchML is a suitable solution to improve query execution time on top of scalable model persistence frameworks. Tool support is fully available online as an open-source Eclipse plug-in.