Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database is a memory-optimized relational database that provides applications with extremely fast response time and very high throughput as required by many applications in a wide range of industries. (Product Data Sheet)

Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database (TimesTen) delivers real-time performance by changing the assumptions around where data resides at runtime.  By managing data in memory, and optimizing data structures and access algorithms accordingly, database operations execute with maximum efficiency, achieving dramatic gains in responsiveness and throughput, even compared to a fully cached disk-based RDBMS.  TimesTen is designed as an embeddable database within the applications to further improve performance of database operations by eliminating inter-process communication and network overheads.

Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database is commonly deployed with multi-user and multi-threaded applications using row-level locking and committed-read isolation. Applications access TimesTen databases using standard SQL via JDBC, ODBC, Oracle Call Interface, Pro*C/C++, and Oracle PL/SQL programming interfaces. While the best response time is achieved with TimesTen running in-process with the application, conventional client/server access is used when a database is shared by several applications running on a number of servers.

Oracle TimesTen databases are persistent and recoverable. Durability is achieved through a combination of transaction logging and database checkpointing to disk.

TimesTen Replication enables real-time transactional replication between TimesTen databases. Due to the mission-critical nature of the applications, most deployments add TimesTen Replication for high-availability and load balancing. Availability is an essential requirement for most real-time applications. Industries that operate 24x7, such as telecommunications, and global systems that are Web-accessible, such as travel and reservations sites, cannot tolerate service downtime. Securities trading systems must remain continuously available while financial markets are open.

TimesTen Replication provides the following functionality for performance and consistency:

• Flexible architecture supporting a range of configuration options, available over LAN and WAN. 
• Transaction-log based replication scheme enables high efficiency and low overhead.
• Asynchronous replication provides maximum performance, and the application is completely decoupled from the receipt process of the replicated elements on the subscriber.
• Synchronous replication provides higher level of confidence for data consistency between the active and standby databases; the application is blocked until the transaction has been both received and committed on the standby database.
• The standby database is always available for reads; additional read capacity can be provided by configuring additional read-only subscribers.
• Failure detection and failover to the standby database is achieved by seamless integration with Oracle Clusterware.
• Online upgrade allows individual server to be taken offline for software upgrades, while other servers continue uninterrupted.

For applications with existing data already residing in an Oracle database, caching a performance-critical subset of the data into the TimesTen In-Memory Database is a practical solution to improve application transaction response time. Refer to the Oracle In-Memory Database Cache Overview here.

Related links

• Oracle In-Memory Database Cache