Oracle revamps TimesTen In-Memory Database

By Mark Brunelli, News Editor 13 Feb 2007 | SearchOracle.com

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Unveiled today, Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database Release 7 features tighter integration and caching with Oracle Database 10g, as well as support for new data sets and languages, according to Oracle.

TimesTen, a product Oracle acquired when it purchased TimesTen Inc. in June 2005, is a relational database that resides directly within an application. Oracle says the database is generally deployed as an embedded cache or a standalone database and operates entirely in-memory using standard SQL interfaces.

TimesTen is designed to help companies in financial markets deal with frequently problematic issues related to data speed, data integration and data consolidation, said David Cox, an analyst with Framingham, Mass.-based Financial Insights Inc.

TimesTen software gives risk managers, portfolio managers and potentially even traders the ability to capture fluctuating stock and commodity prices in real time and notify relevant business applications, the analyst said.

Learn more about TimesTen: Oracle beefs up database offering with TimesTen Oracle quick out of gate with TimesTen update

"Basically, it moves data faster and refreshes and updates applications based on event-driven activity," Cox said. "There's a lot of relevance around it."

TimesTen now fully supports familiar Oracle Database 10g data types for easier application development and in-memory data caching, and it supports more than 50 database character sets and 80 languages, said Jim Groff, Oracle's senior vice president of business strategy and former CEO of TimesTen Inc.

Data in Oracle TimesTen can be dynamically loaded and automatically aged out of memory after a certain amount of time, Groff said, and the software allows users to automatically synchronize data across multiple TimesTen and Oracle databases.

Groff said the new version of TimesTen offers "dynamic" database caching of Oracle databases for high-volume transaction processing; business activity monitoring; real-time business intelligence; customer relationship management; and customer self-service.

"[These] enhancements relate to making the TimesTen In-Memory Database a much more transparent front end, or real-time cache that sits in front of a back-end Oracle Database," Groff said. "We have three specific caching scenarios which are now supported out of the box."

Groff said TimesTen 7 now supports dynamic, on-demand caching, which is often used in customer-facing applications to load and update data for specific customers in real time; sliding time window caching, which is used in business intelligence and analytics; and reference data caching for customer-facing Web sites where things like product catalogs, business rules and metadata are regularly accessed.

"When a customer is no longer active on the Web site or when they're relatively inactive, you can automatically migrate their information back to the back-end Oracle database -- have it aged out of the cache, if you will -- because you're not using it anymore," Groff explained.

Pricing for Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database starts at $12,000 per CPU and can increase depending on the size of the in-memory database. The software is available for download from Oracle's Web site.

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