Some of the new products simply move the action from disk to memory, where access is a million times faster. Others are more radical departures from tradition, such as "streaming" technologies that store queries and pass data through them rather than run queries against stored data. Still others have found clever ways to sidestep much of the overhead -- such as table locking -- associated with the traditional RDBMS.

While some of these products do "store" data in memory-resident data-bases -- either relational or object-oriented -- the tools are primarily designed to speed transaction processing and analytics, not to act as data repositories.

Thanks for the memory

Interact Inc., a Lincoln, Neb.-based communications service provider, has for more than 10 years used the in-memory database capabilities of Hewlett-Packard Co.'s NonStop servers to do real-time pricing of incoming telephone calls. But the big, expensive computers were overkill for some Interact customers, such as small mobile telephony resellers, says Tom Massey, director of business development.

So 18 months ago, Interact began to offer a call-pricing service that runs on Linux and Unix servers and uses Oracle Corp.'s TimesTen In-Memory database. "NonStop is big iron and more geared to larger operators," Massey says. "Linux and Unix platforms scale down much better, and operators often prefer them because they are not knowledgeable about NonStop."