Oracle TimesTen

The Oracle corporation released at the end of 2011 the new version of TimesTen — DBMS executing all processing in RAM. It will become the main component of the hardware and software system Oracle Exalytics and the rival of the SAP HANA platform.

TimesTen 11g Release 2 in Oracle describe as the relational DBMS providing fast execution of transactions and high processing speed required to crucial applications. Among new features — the increased performance and higher scalability on number of simultaneous users, sessions and requests. For TimesTen the mechanism of a compression of the columns providing fivefold data compression, which are in memory is implemented.

The functionality, traditional for TimesTen, expected analytical tasks and online transaction processing is expanded. Oracle announced that along with DBMS there is a billing system of Communications Billing and Revenue Management which thanks to the updated TimesTen will provide considerable increases in the speed and scalability. Oracle also says that thanks to TimesTen the packet of Business Intelligence Foundation Suite too preset on Exalytics will be able to work 20 times quicker.

DBMS with data processing in RAM in the last few years really became a subject of close attention as amount of data, generated by the person and machines, grows at explosive rates. The release of upgraded version of TimesTen DBMS is the reply of Oracle company to the growing requirements of the market – the updated product implements the most advanced opportunities both for online transaction processing (OLTP), and for online analytics (OLAP).

It is worth reminding that TimesTen DBMS in itself exists since 1996 when the company of the same name was founded. In 2005 the Oracle company absorbed TimesTen, and the foundress of the company Marie-Anne Meimat became the vice president of Oracle for development of the product TimesTen.

As in TimesTen DBMS all data reside in RAM, and the network does not separate them on rather slow servers and information warehouses, it is possible to carry out data processing with smaller number of instructions that leads to sharp performance improvement. The main consumers of such fast and effective approach are financial structures, broker offices, telecom operators and other large-scale organizations with the large volume of transactions in IT-systems.

The new version of TimesTen DBMS carries the official name TimesTen In-Memory Database 11g of Release 2. Such innovations as the paralellizovanny procedure of replication and new means of online analytics with data processing in memory became the main differences of this version. According to Ann-Mari Meymat, parallel sending log records from active nodes on reserve then use of transactions repeats on a reserve node is also supported. In opinion Meymat, these new tools allow to service much more users, it is more than requests more sessions of connection on each node.

With release of new version 11g of R2 the TimesTen platform is delivered now complete with the Oracle Communications BRM system (Billing and Revenue Management is billing and control of revenue), at the expense of what the Oracle BRM system offers the reduced reaction time, the increased capacity and service of bigger number of subscribers in comparison with the previous versions now.