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GCN Home > 04/02/07 issue

Fast times in database research

Navy, CIA kick tires on new in-memory technologies

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

At least a few government agencies are taking a close look at a new form of database technology, called in-memory databases, that promise faster transaction speeds than standard relational database management systems.

Raytheon Co. of Lexington, Mass., is incorporating two inline databases for the some of the shipboard electronic and combat systems of the Navy DDG 1000 Zumwalt Class Destroyers, which the integrator is helping build for Northrop Grumman Corp.

And last month, In-Q-Tel, the private venture capital firm created by the Central Intelligence Agency, made a strategic investment in StreamBase Systems Inc., a Lexington, Mass.-based provider of in-memory database software and associated analysis tools.

In-memory databases are databases optimized for working in the working memory of machines. Usually, databases are stored in main memory, typically on hard drives. When new material is generated, it is written to disk first, and when a query is made of the database from a program, that material has to be read off the disk. In contrast, in-memory databases reside entirely in the working memory, or RAM, of a server or cluster of servers (though they can be archived on disk). Material is only written later to disk, if at all.

Persistence pays
“The working dataset that the application will be using is resident, or persistent in memory,” said Patrick Moor, head of government contracting and manufacturing for Ants Software Inc. of Burlingame, Calif., one of the companies chosen for the Raytheon work. The other company was TimesTen, another inline database company now owned by Oracle Corp. of Redwood Shores, Calif.

RAM works faster than hard drives, though it also is far more expensive on a per-byte basis. It also is volatile, meaning the data is lost once the power is shut off. But because these in-memory databases reside in RAM, they are generally able to ingest hundreds of thousands of transactions per second. They also can be queried against more rapidly.

“For many applications where you need to capture, react to and analyze that data instantaneously, a database is just too slow,” said Bill Hobbib, vice president of marketing of Streambase. With traditional RDMS “you are storing the data before you query it. We can query the data at the moment it arrives.”

More news on related topics: Storage Management, Business Process Management, Content / Record Management, Defense IT



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