High-Speed Databases Rev Corporate Apps

Computerworld - Relational database management systems have become all but ubiquitous in enterprise computing since 1970, when they were first devised by E.F. Codd. But as powerful and flexible as those databases are, they've proved inadequate for a handful of ultrademanding applications that have to process hundreds or thousands of transactions per second and never go down. Now, the very-high-performance database technologies that sprang up to serve these niche markets, such as options trading and telephone call processing, are poised to move into mainstream computing.

Image Credit: Richard Borge

Some of the new products simply move the action from disk to memory, where access is a million times faster. Others are more radical departures from tradition, such as "streaming" technologies that store queries and pass data through them rather than run queries against stored data. Still others have found clever ways to sidestep much of the overhead -- such as table locking -- associated with the traditional RDBMS.
While some of these products do "store" data in memory-resident data-bases -- either relational or object-oriented -- the tools are primarily designed to speed transaction processing and analytics, not to act as data repositories.
Thanks for the Memory
Interact Inc., a Lincoln, Neb.-based communications service provider, has for more than 10 years used the in-memory database capabilities of Hewlett-Packard Co.'s NonStop servers to do real-time pricing of incoming telephone calls. But the big, expensive computers were overkill for some Interact customers, such as small mobile telephony resellers, says Tom Massey, director of business development.
So 18 months ago, Interact began to offer a call-pricing service that runs on Linux and Unix servers and uses Oracle Corp.'s TimesTen In-Memory database. "NonStop is big iron and more geared to larger operators," Massey says. "Linux and Unix platforms scale down much better, and operators often prefer them because they are not knowledgeable about NonStop."
Oracle acquired the TimesTen technology last June. Oracle saw the in-memory database as a way to extend its enterprise back-end data storage capabilities to high-performance real-time applications such as Interact's. Interact uses Oracle for back-end data storage as well and does not yet interface those databases with TimesTen, but Massey says he plans to do so.
"We need sub-10-millisecond response time, and you can't get that performance out of an Oracle relational database," says Ed McKee, director of applications at Interact. "To get that kind of performance, the amount of iron you'd have to have would be very significant."
On the other hand, he notes, the in-memory TimesTen product isn't suitable for large-scale data