News

Object DB Provides Direct Access to Java Devs

• By John K. Waters
• September 30, 2010

InterSystems Corporation, the Cambridge, Mass-based developer of the CACHÉ "post-relational database," today released CACHÉ 2010, its flagship high-performance object DB with new features aimed at organizations with complex, high-volume, Java-based event processing environments, and CIOs "seeking out database solutions that combine persistent storage with extremely high performance," the company said, in a statement.

For Java jocks, the highlight of this release is CACHÉ eXTreme for Java, which is designed to provide direct Java access to the CACHÉ multidimensional database engine. The idea here is to give Java developers better tools for building systems in which processing speed is of critical importance, data changes very rapidly, and data persistence is an absolute requirement, said Robert Nagle, InterSystems' VP of Software Development, in a statement. 

InterSystems claims that providing direct Java access to the CACHÉ multidimensional database engine can yield performance that is three to seven times faster than other data-handling approaches -- essentially, equal to performance equal to an in-memory database, but with the persistence of both historical and transactional data that is required for event processing and event-driven SOA.

CACHÉ eXTreme also supports eXTreme event persistence where developers store Java objects in the CACHÉ database. This approach automatically creates a Java binding and data can be accessed through Java using objects or SQL for maximum development flexibility, the company says.

InterSystems claims that using CACHÉ eXTreme requires minimal training; a Java developer with a year of experience can be productive in just a few days, the company said.

"We've seen a tremendous amount of excitement about CACHÉ eXTreme for Java throughout our customer base, with particular interest coming from organizations in the financial services, logistics, scientific R&D and utility/power supply sectors," Nagle said in a statement. “We expect that IT executives who must address requirements for data persistence in event processing systems while also providing extremely high performance will move rapidly to adopt this advanced technology."

This release also introduces CACHÉ Database Mirroring, a feature designed to provide automatic failover between any two CACHÉ-based systems, without the need for specialized storage and networking hardware, the company says. The benefits of this capability are very straightforward: flexibility for planned downtimes, lower configuration complexity for lower overall risks to the system and business continuity support (mirrored DBs can be housed in separate data centers).

The Database Mirroring capability has been especially popular among healthcare providers, the company says. InterSystems is well known as a leading application platform provider in healthcare; its software is currently part of systems in major hospitals and labs around the world.