Oracle forges TimesTen links to 10g Database

Oracle has released a new version of the TimesTen database that the enterprise software giant picked up in 2005 up as part of its ongoing acquisition spree.

Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database Release 7 adds integration and cacheing with Oracle’s flagship Database 10g. The new release offers data type compatibility, replication with 10g and 10g-like semantics and behaviours. Oracle developer, middleware and clustering capabilities are also supported.

TimesTen is a popular product in financial services, telecoms and other fields that require very fast response times. By using system RAM for storing data rather than paging to disk, performance can be much improved compared to conventional database systems.

Oracle positioned the TimesTen release as offering a middle-tier approach that complements the Oracle Database 10g’s role for enterprise-wide data management. Customer information, real-time analytics and other data can be cached and then presented in an Oracle Database, for example.

“Since the Oracle acquisition of TimesTen we’ve seen a greater need for real-time performance with very low latency, fast response times an high-volume throughput because of things like business intelligence, service-oriented architectures and analytics where it makes sense to have data stored at the edge in a cache,” said Rex Wang, Oracle vice-president of embedded systems.

“There has been a really good cross-pollination of Oracle and TimesTen, particularly where TimesTen is serving as a cache for Oracle to accelerate applications that already use the Oracle database.”

Although many customers run TimesTen as a standalone database, over half of users now run it as a cache for Oracle or other back-end database, Wang added.

TimesTen technology is also finding its way into other Oracle wares, for example in the Oracle Communication and Mobility Server released earlier this month and aimed at the telecoms sector.