FAQ's

Questions:

1. What RDBMS or databases are supported by SafePeak and which versions?
2. Which database operating system (OS) are supported by SafePeak?
3. What application technologies (.Net, Java, etc) are supported by SafePeak, and can benefit from its database caching abilities?
4. What are the server configuration and operating system requirements for SafePeak installation?
5. Can SafePeak be installed on a VM (virtual machine)? What vendors are supported?
6. Does SafePeak have fail over mechanisms?
7. Is it possible to change a connection string for the application, without the need to change it again if we later disconnect or move SafePeak?
8. What are the limitations of SafePeak's caching abilities?
9. How does SafePeak handle information security?

Answers:

1. What are supported databases and which versions?
SQL Server 2000, 2005, 2008, 2008 R2 are supported by SafePeak, both 32 bit and 64 bit versions.  

2. Which database operating systems (OS) are supported by SafePeak?
SafePeak can connect to an SQL Server that sits on any OS: Windows 2000, 2003, 2008, 2008 R2 - 32 bit and 64 bit.

3. What application technologies (.Net, Java, etc) are supported by SafePeak, and can benefit from its database caching abilities?
SafePeak is transparent to the technology the lies beneath the application. For example: .Net, Java, PHP, Ruby, C++, etc - are all supported. All these technologies access the SQL Server using SQL Client / OlEDB / ODBC clients which are all supported by SafePeak.

4. What are the server configuration and operating system requirements for SafePeak installation? 
Server hardware configuration requirements are strongly related to the load (transactions or batch requests per second) present on your databases that are connected to SafePeak.
We recommend minimum of 4 Cores + 4 GB RAM. Per SQL Insance you should allocate 2 CPU Cores + 2-8 GB RAM, depending on your needs. In addition, 30GB for hard disk space per each SQL instance.
SafePeak can be installed on Windows 2008 64 bit and Windows 2008 R2.

5. Can SafePeak be installed on a VM (virtual machine)? What vendors are supported?
Yes. SafePeak can be installed either on a hardware server or on a virtual server from VMware,  Microsoft Hyper-V and Xen.
Cloud virtual instances, like Amazon Web Services EC2 or GoGrid, are also supported. 

6. Does SafePeak have fail over mechanisms?
Yes. SafePeak is fully redundant to both software possible failures as well as hardware failures (hardware fail over is available only in SafePeak enterprise edition).

7. Is it possible to change a connection string for the application, without the need to change it again if we later disconnect or move SafePeak?
There are several techniques you can apply for this matter. For example:
Create a special DNS Record that will point to SafePeak server IP. Later, if you need to disconnect or move SafePeak, the administrator will update the DNS record so it will point to the database server actual IP or to a new IP of SafePeak.

8. What are the limitations of SafePeak's caching abilities?
Memory size: Because of SafePeak 64 bit architecture, SafePeak memory size is limited only to the maximum available memory from the Windows OS. In case no enough memory exists on the machine, SafePeak Cache Module will automatically evict old items from cache.

Protocol limitations: SafePeak doesn't perform caching of client cursors.
SafePeak is able to cache free queries, stored procedures, prep_exec, exec, execute, RPC execution, etc.

9. How does SafePeak handle information security?
All authentication is done by the database server, both for SQL server authentication, as well as NTLM and Kerberos. When the application opens a connection to the database, SafePeak acts as a proxy and leaves all the decisions to the database.

Once a connection is established, the queries that are stored and returned from cache are checked not only for their query key, but also the schema name. This is done due to the ability of different logins to access the same tables but with different data, because each login can be fitted to a different schema name with similar table names. SafePeak automatically fits the cached result per each query, its parameters (or bind variables) and the schema correlated to the current login connection.

The results are stored only in memory - no physical (disk) copy exists.

Inside the data center, SafePeak's server can be protected by the firewall(s) and methods that are applied to your database.