Boost Salesforce Performance with Platform Cache

In Salesforce, performance is key to delivering a seamless user experience. With the growing complexity of applications and data, optimizing processes is essential. One way to significantly enhance performance is through Platform Cache—a feature that allows you to store and manage data in memory for faster access, reducing redundant queries, API calls, and recalculations. In this post, we'll explore what Platform Cache is, its benefits, and how you can use it to supercharge your Salesforce org.

What is Platform Cache?

Platform Cache in Salesforce is a high-performance, in-memory caching layer that allows you to store frequently accessed data, so your application doesn’t have to retrieve it repeatedly from the database. By caching this data, you can improve the performance of your application and optimize your overall resource usage.

Key Benefits of Platform Cache

1. Improved Performance By storing commonly accessed data in memory, you can reduce the number of times Salesforce queries the database or performs expensive API calls. This helps speed up your operations and reduce processing times for common tasks.
2. Session and Org-Level Caching Salesforce Platform Cache allows you to store data at two levels:
3. Reduced API Calls and SOQL Queries API calls and database queries can be time-consuming and costly in terms of resources. Caching their results means fewer repeated calls and queries, reducing overall system load and improving responsiveness.
4. Efficient Resource Usage Memory-based caching is much faster than querying a database repeatedly. This allows you to minimize resource consumption and significantly improve response times.

Platform Cache Components

1. Partitions A partition is a logical storage area in Platform Cache where data is stored as key-value pairs. There are two types of partitions:
2. Keys and Values Data in Platform Cache is stored as key-value pairs, where each key uniquely identifies the data. You can retrieve cached data using its associated key.
3. TTL (Time to Live) Cached data isn’t meant to live forever. You can define a Time to Live (TTL) for each cache entry, ensuring that outdated data expires and is refreshed as needed.

Example Use Cases

• Storing Common Data: Cache frequently used data such as configuration settings, picklist values, or query results that are shared across multiple users.
• Reducing API Calls: When your org makes frequent API calls to external services, you can store the results in the cache to minimize the number of external calls.
• Session-Specific Data: You can cache session-specific information like user preferences or shopping cart details.

How to Use Platform Cache in Apex

Using Platform Cache in Apex is straightforward. Salesforce provides the Cache.Org and Cache.Session classes for interacting with cached data.

1. Storing Data

Cache.Org.put('myKey', myData);        

1. Retrieving Data

String cachedData = (String) Cache.Org.get('myKey');        

1. Checking if Data Exists

if (Cache.Org.contains('myKey')) {
    // Cache contains the value
}        

Steps to Set Up Platform Cache

1. Enable Platform Cache

Go to Setup → Platform Cache.

Enable it for your Salesforce org.

2. Create a Cache Partition

After enabling, create a partition to store cache data. This is where your key-value pairs will be stored.

3. Use Platform Cache in Apex

Once the partition is set up, you can start caching data in your Apex classes, Visualforce pages, or Lightning Components.

Common Use Case in Code

Here’s a common use case for caching data in Salesforce using the Org Cache partition:

// Get partition
Cache.Org.Partition partition = Cache.Org.getPartition('MyPartition');

// Store data in the cache (data expires after 1 hour)
partition.put('myCacheKey', myValue, 60 * 60); // 1 hour = 60 * 60 seconds

// Retrieve data from the cache
String myCachedValue = (String) partition.get('myCacheKey');

// If the data is not in the cache, query the database and cache the result
if (myCachedValue == null) {
    myCachedValue = [SELECT Name FROM Account WHERE Id = :myId LIMIT 1].Name;
    partition.put('myCacheKey', myCachedValue);
}        

In this example, we check if the cached value exists using the key 'myCacheKey'. If it does not, we query the database, retrieve the data, and store it in the cache for future use.

Conclusion

Platform Cache is a powerful tool for improving the performance and efficiency of your Salesforce applications. Whether you're reducing API calls, minimizing SOQL queries, or storing session-specific data, Platform Cache helps optimize resource usage and speeds up common operations. By leveraging caching in your applications, you’ll enhance the user experience and reduce the load on your Salesforce org.