TimesTen: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

TimesTen is a high-performance, standards-based relational database with a variety of options for availability, durability, atomicity, and more. It is used intensively in the telecom and financial markets, and is increasingly used more broadly, for example in the travel and gaming industries. It is intended for use in applications where high throughput and/or low latency are key requirements.

Product Information

TimesTen uses in-memory database technology to speed access to data. Indexing, query optimization, and storage management, for example, are designed specially for in-memory data access. All TimesTen data must fit into memory, but when it does, performance is much faster than other data management systems even when their data is cached in memory.

TimesTen runs on the major Unix/Linux platforms and on various Windows platforms. Its standard support includes ODBC and JDBC interfaces and the SQL query language. It offers several types of replication, including asynchronous and 2-safe, as well as event notification and interoperability with Oracle through an "Oracle Connect" caching component. Relatively new is a Message Integration Framework which works with Tibco and uses asynchronous replication internally along with retry to provide high-performance transactions with strong durability guarantees.

TimesTen was formed as a spin-off from HP Labs (Palo Alto) in November 1996. It is a private, venture-backed company located in Mountain View, CA.