data-api-builder-caching

name	data-api-builder-caching
description	Configure Data API Builder result caching across L1 in-memory, L2 distributed (Redis), and HTTP Cache-Control behavior.
license	MIT

Data API Builder Caching

Use when

• Reducing repeat database round trips for read-heavy REST entities.
• Sharing cache across scaled-out DAB instances with Redis (L2).
• Letting clients force fresh reads via Cache-Control request headers.

Workflow

1. Enable globally under runtime.cache with a sane default ttl-seconds.
2. Opt each entity in via cache: { enabled, ttl-seconds, level }; pick L1 (in-memory only) or L1L2 (default, adds distributed Redis when enabled).
3. For multi-instance deployments, add runtime.cache.level-2 with provider: redis, connection-string, and optional partition.
4. Validate with REST reads; Cache-Control: no-cache forces a database refresh and updates cache, while no-store prevents this response from populating or refreshing cache.

Minimal config

"runtime": {
  "cache": {
    "enabled": true,
    "ttl-seconds": 30,
    "level-2": { "enabled": true, "provider": "redis", "connection-string": "localhost:6379", "partition": "prod-api" }
  }
},
"entities": {
  "Book": { "cache": { "enabled": true, "ttl-seconds": 120, "level": "L1L2" } }
}

Guardrails

• Caching applies to REST query operations only; GraphQL request-level cache directives are not honored.
• Don't cache volatile or per-user-sensitive entities with long TTLs.
• If L2 isn't enabled globally, entities set to L1L2 silently behave as L1.
• DAB does not emit Cache-Control response headers; it only reads request directives (no-cache, no-store).
• DAB ignores other standard request directives such as max-age and max-stale.

Related skills

• data-api-builder-config
• data-api-builder-rest
• data-api-builder-observability

Microsoft Learn

• https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/data-api-builder/concept/cache/level-1
• https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/data-api-builder/concept/cache/level-2
• https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/data-api-builder/concept/cache/http-headers