Main memory database vendor TimesTen Performance Software Inc was at HP World last week demonstrating what it called off the scale performance using the newly shipping HP 9000 N Class servers. It says it measured 3.9 million database transactions per minute, or 65,000 per second, using a benchmark that measures the throughput of internet-oriented database workloads. All the tests were carried out through a standard ODBC interface, on a 4- way HP N-Class running the 64-bit HP-UX 11 operating system.
TimesTen says that the ability to process 65,000 database records a second enables e-commerce applications to make personalized purchase recommendations on the fly. According to TimesTen’s CEO James Groff no existing benchmarks can be used to predict how well a system or database will perform these kinds of applications.
The company says that financial news sites supporting continuous stock quotes and enquiries are already seeing peak loads of 12,000 operations per second, a figure doubling every year. Online retailers need to capture and analyze around 10,000 website events per second, while internet portal companies planning online status reporting for banner ads require tens of thousands of click-through records to be aggregated in minutes rather than days.
TimesTen has joint technology agreements in place with both HP and Sun Microsystems Inc, and earlier this year signed an agreement with Intel Corp for the development of an optimized version of the database for the IA-64 product line, beginning with Merced. The company started life as DataXel Corp, which was spun-off from HP back in November 1996. With the number of times HP referenced the company at last week’s events, some observers began wondering if it might not be taken back into the fold in the future. The Mountain View-based firm is probably too small to survive for long as an independent entity in the fiercely competitive internet database world.
