Oracle has stepped up the integration between its in-memory database system, TimesTen Release 7, and its flagship Oracle 10g database in hopes that customers will draft TimesTen as a front-end service to 10g.

TimesTen is the former startup, commercial system that Oracle acquired in July 2005. Its advocate as a front-end system to 10g is Jim Groff, former TimesTen CEO, now Oracle senior VP of business strategy.

TimesTen resides in the random access memory, or RAM, of a server, able to respond really fast to requests for data -- at speeds that rival the movement of electrical impulses. That makes it suitable for financial services or trading systems where trader and system response times are crucial down to tenths of a second. Groff says that's one of the places where TimesTen has been employed so far, but he thinks customers will soon be making wider use of its near-real time properties.

"People do more searching than they used to. It's exploding [in areas such as travel] compared to a few years ago," said Groff in an interview. If the data being sought has been pulled out of a back-end database and is cached in TimesTen, then the time it takes to go from "look to book" in reserving a flight, hotel, and or car can be speeded up to the point it's a competitive advantage, he says.

For that reason, TimesTen in Release 7 ships preconfigured with three common caching options, one of which may be invoked out of the box.

This story was updated to correct the spelling of Jim Groff's name.