US Patent 9942084 Managing data stored in distributed buffer caches

Techniques are described for automatically managing the use of a buffer cache in volatile memory, including in at least some situations to distribute the buffer cache across the volatile memory of a pool of multiple computing devices. Furthermore, the data that is stored in such a distributed buffer cache may in some situations be stored in a redundant manner, such that the stored data may be recovered from a subset of the computing devices in the pool, such as by using erasure coding techniques. In some situations, the described techniques are used to provide a distributed database buffer cache to support operations of a database server program for a database—thus, as database data is retrieved from a non-volatile storage device, that database data may also be redundantly stored across the distributed database buffer cache for later retrieval and use.