Each of Grupo's two Ants servers runs on a dual-processor 3.1-GHz Xeon system with 2GB of RAM. They share a MicroAppliance disk array connected via a storage-area network.

Two analysts agreed that the Ants approach is unique, though they disagreed about its prospects.

Philip Howard, a database analyst at U.K.-based Bloor Research, called Ants, which only rarely requires heavily accessed data fields to be locked, a 'pretty revolutionary' advance over conventional databases, such as Oracle, IBM's DB2 and Microsoft's SQL Server, which all added row-level locking five to 10 years ago.

Row-level locking 'is not a big issue in more static data warehouses. It's not a big deal with databases mostly focused on queries and analysis, where there are no contention problems on updating data,' Howard said. But it can impose 'a real performance constraint' in OLTP environments, where he thinks database administrators are most likely to embrace the Ants technology.

But Curt Monash, a database management consultant in Acton, Mass., and a Computerworld columnist, said that OLTP users tend to be conservative in adopting technology because they are reluctant to tamper with mission-critical databases. 'Even if the technology does all that Ants claims, it's going to be hard for them,' he said.