TimesTen
TimesTen is an in-memory relational database software product from Oracle Corporation. TimesTen is designed for low latency, high-volume data, event and transaction management. Unlike disk-optimized relational databases such as the Oracle database, DB2, Informix, and SQL Server, TimesTen's data is located entirely in memory; no disk I/O is required for query operations. As memory is far faster than hard disk, TimesTen is used in applications where Service level agreements require very fast and predictable response time, such as network equipment, telecommunication, real-time financial services trading applications, and large web applications. Unlike custom-built memory structures such as Hash tables, TimesTen is a relational database that is accessed with standard ODBC and JDBC, providing the rich functionality of the SQL query language.
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[edit] History
TimesTen was originally designed and implemented at Hewlett-Packard labs in Palo Alto, California by Marie-Anne Neimat, Sherry Listgarten, and Kurt Shoens. In 1996, the product was spun off into a separate venture capital funded startup company based in Mountain View, California under the leadership of CEO Jim Groff. The product became popular for telecommunications equipment, as response times in the milliseconds or even microseconds were required for applications like packet switching. The company had 80 employees and was profitable when it was acquired by Oracle Corporation in 2005. Since the acquisition, Neimat remains the director of TimesTen development at Oracle, adding many Oracle database features to the product such as PL/SQL stored procedures.
[edit] Product information
TimesTen is an in-memory database management technology that speeds access to data. Indexing, query optimization, and storage management, for example, are designed specially for in-memory data access. The result is high throughput and low, predictable response times, even on commodity hardware. The product also incorporates replication facilities, non-blocking operation, and an event-notification mechanism that works together with materialized views to convey changes to other systems. TimesTen saves each transaction in its log and checkpoint files on disk, so data is not lost in the event of system failure.
TimesTen provides the capability of caching data from an Oracle database backend. SQL predicates are used to specify what data is cached, or data can be loaded into the cache on demand (and later automatically aged out). Data can be changed in the cache, with writes being propagated synchronously or asynchronously back to Oracle.
TimesTen products run on the major Unix/Linux platforms and on various Windows platforms, in both 32-bit and 64-bit modes.
[edit] Limitations
Since all of TimesTen's data must reside in memory (in a shared memory segment), the size of the database is limited to the amount of RAM available on its host computers. Although some customers have production TimesTen databases as large as one terabyte, most customers have smaller databases that are utilized for on-line transaction processing.
