Oracle's 10g, TimesTen In-Memory System Now March In Lockstep

Oracle has stepped up the integration between its two database systems in hopes that customers will draft TimesTen as a front-end service to 10g.

Charles Babcock, Editor at Large, Cloud

February 12, 2007

1 Min Read
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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.

About the Author

Charles Babcock

Editor at Large, Cloud

Charles Babcock is an editor-at-large for InformationWeek and author of Management Strategies for the Cloud Revolution, a McGraw-Hill book. He is the former editor-in-chief of Digital News, former software editor of Computerworld and former technology editor of Interactive Week. He is a graduate of Syracuse University where he obtained a bachelor's degree in journalism. He joined the publication in 2003.

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