TimesTen and In Memory Databases.....

From: Solomon_Man <cmgray74_at_gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 5 Mar 2009 14:36:19 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <e90a314f-e3fc-4fb9-9b62-efc05df055a6_at_z6g2000pre.googlegroups.com>

All,
I have been assigned to evaluate the TimesTen in memory database software.
Please note I am not a DBA but I do have quite a bit of systems knowledge.

From what I have seen I have not been that impressed based on the price point and some of the issues I have read about.

Such as

1. You can easily get resource contention (CPU, memory, I/O) between oracle and TimesTen. This can hurt TimesTen performance (and Oracle performance). So we can get around alot of this by putting the TimesTen Databases on another Box. This is not a big issue in our case as we are in a Grid configuration situation but still its additional cost.

2.The TimesTen should run on the same machine as the application and be accessed using direct mode not client/server to maximise performance. This could be a problem but not in our case. This fact could force some upgrades to existing machinery in our case and the additional cost is a factor.

I am more worried about issues with data table sizes. We have very large data tables. We are talking many millions of rows and hundreds of columns is very typical in a few of our temporary tables.

Anyone had experience using Times Ten with very large Data Tables?

3. Users must optimize the Times Ten Database besides the Oracle Database.
Most likely not a problem but still a learning curve.

4. No Procedure on the TimesTen Database at this point (release). This is a major issue, in my opinion, is there ways around this?

What can I expect for speed improvements, 5X , 10X, 100X with Times Ten?

 I understand the advantage of moving things into memory and avoiding some of the I/O issues. Would I be better off adding an additional processor or another rack then more memory instead of adding the complexity of another piece of Software and machinery. Or even the possibility of a data warehouse and update tables on X amount of time.

Opinions are welcome.

Thanks,
Chris Received on Thu Mar 05 2009 - 16:36:19 CST