TimesTen Performance Software Inc, a Mountain View, California- based spin-off from Hewlett-Packard Co’s research labs, is now ready to come to market with database technology that stores and manages information in a system’s main memory, rather than on slower, disk-based storage. The company claims its Main-Memory Data Manager, now available, is the first such product to embrace the principles of main-memory technology, and provides a ten- times performance speed-up when compared to traditional database systems. TimesTen started life two years ago as DataXel Corp, which was spun-off from HP back in November 1996. HP retained a 15% stake in the company, which gained additional funding from Arnold Silverman, of Discovery Ventures, an early investor in Oracle Corp, and Roger Sippl, the founder of Informix Software Inc and Visigenic Software Corp. The firm’s core product came from HP’s Smallbase main memory database management system in the early 1990s, and actually appeared embedded within a commercial product called Opencall IM, aimed at telecommunications companies. The new product, styled as release 2.0 in deference to the Smallbase version, maintains standard SQL and ODBC interfaces, while delivering, says the company real-time relational performance. Only now, with the reduction in price of Random Access Memory and the introduction of 64-bit processors, is the technology really becoming cost- effective. TimesTen says that its technology ensures that data is not lost if the machine goes down as it periodically writes out logs to the native file system of changes to the data store. The ODBC driver manager, a notorious bottleneck, can be circumvented by direct calls to an optimized TimesTen driver for higher performance where necessary. TimesTen’s shared libraries occupy under 3Mb of memory, leaving the rest available for the user data. Data capacity is limited to between 1.5 and 2.5Gb, at least until 64-bit versions of the major operating systems become more generally available, probably this year. The product currently runs on HP-UX, IBM’s AIX, Sun Solaris and Windows NT. Prices are expected to range between $20,000 and $160,000. Digital Equipment Corp, with its VLM very large memory support for Oracle and Sybase databases on 64-bit Alpha hardware, have been nodding in the same technical direction over the past year or so.
