First Oracle-Branded TimesTen Release Available

Release 6.0 of TimesTen focuses on improved caching between Oracle's backend database and the TimesTen in-memory database.

It now supports a "much higher rate of updates in the cache and makes the combination of the TimesTen cache and Oracle database more resilient to failures and much more highly available," said Tim Shetler, vice president of technology marketing for TimesTen, now relocated from Mountain View, Calif., up the road to Oracle's Redwood Shores headquarters.

"If you lose the network connection between tiers, as soon as it's restored, we automatically link up and sync up," he said.

In keeping with Oracle's latest "hot-pluggable" message, the in-memory database, which typically runs in the middle tier, is certified for use with major application servers including Oracle's own as well as JBoss, BEA and IBM offerings. The new release adds support for the latest Java Messaging Service (JMS) API, and JDBC drivers. Oracle purchased TimesTen in June.

TimesTen made its name powering fast-turnaround travel site and security applications. "People then started to want us for activity monitoring, event processing and [for use in] service oriented architectures," Sheler said, noting that TimesTen can look at thousands of records per second and the independent company had long worked with Oracle.

In other Oracle news, the database giant said last week it had acquired InnoBase, an open source database player in Finland. Terms were not disclosed.

In a short statement, Oracle said: "InnoDB is not a standalone database product: it is distributed as part of the MySQL database. InnoDB's contractual relationship with MySQL comes up for renewal next year. Oracle fully expects to negotiate an extension to that relationship."

Innobase provides InnoDB, one of the storage engines that plug into MySQL. The others are MyISAM, Memory, Merge, and Cluster. MySQL 5.0, due later this year, will add support for two archived and federated storage engines.

MySQL appeared unfazed by the news. "The beauty of open source software and the GPL license is freedom. As with all MySQL code, InnoDB is provided under the GPL license, meaning that users have complete freedom to use, develop, and modify the code base. We are pleased to see even broader industry acceptance of open source database technology. This also means that database developers now have even greater flexibility to use MySQL and Oracle in the same environment,” said MySQL CEO Marten Mickos in a statement.