Looking Beyond the Big Three

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May 09, 2005 (Computerworld) -- If you want to understand your technology strategy options, my usual advice is that you should study Microsoft, Oracle and IBM. There's hardly a software product category in which at least one of them isn't a market leader and mar-
keting trendsetter. Enterprise applications, personal applications, operating systems, app servers, network management, security, analytics, app development, nontabular data types, search, speech recognition -- you name it and they're there. And, of course, in database management, they pretty much have divided the whole market up among themselves.
But despite the overwhelming market power of the Big Three, a few other database management systems vendors are still standing, and there are things to be learned from them, too. An interesting matched pair of such companies is Progress Software Corp. and InterSystems Corp., two of the last remaining major independent software vendors in the Boston area. Both started as fourth-generation language (4GL) vendors but soon added matching DBMSs, which, at least nominally, provide the bulk of their revenues. Both sell primarily through indirect channels but derive a large minority of their revenues from direct enterprise sales. Both seem to have decided that object-oriented database and middleware technology is the wave of the future. And that's where the similarities end.
InterSystems is the smaller and less established of the two. But it's also the more interesting company right now, thanks to an unusual DBMS architecture. InterSystems' Cache database manager has a fundamentally object-oriented design. That is, the native DML/DDL (Data Manipulation/Description Language) is emphatically object-oriented, and the access methods are optimized for the storage and retrieval of entire objects. This language is a proprietary outgrowth of the Mumps standard (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System), a health-care-oriented 4GL. Naturally, Java and XML are supported as well. In addition, there is a reasonably versatile and effective SQL overlay.
InterSystems would have you believe that the net effect is blazing performance in major applications, not a lot of performance penalty in add-on applications, all the programming benefits of object orientation and only some of the drawbacks of having business logic and data structure intertwined. A look at InterSystems' user base suggests there's some truth to these claims.

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