Some users choose a memory- resident product for its features and then gain high performance as a byproduct. For example, Interstate Hotels & Resorts Inc. chose the TM1 financial analysis tool from Applix Inc. in Westboro, Mass., because it was easy to use. "We wanted to consolidate all the hotels to close the books each month," says Paul Bushman, senior vice president for IT at the Arlington, Va.-based manager of more than 300 hotels. "But now we use it on a daily basis."

TM1, which Applix calls "the world's fastest business intelligence analytical engine," moves disk-resident data from Oracle databases in Interstate's accounting system into memory in an Excel spreadsheet format. From there, users without technical expertise can run what-if financial models as well as do financial rollups by a variety of user-specified criteria.

They can also perform online consolidations of the type more typically performed in month-end batch processes, Bushman says. "In the accounting system, to produce one financial statement for one hotel for one month could take 30 minutes in a relational database," he says. "But here we can do a consolidation of all 300 hotels in a couple of seconds."

Fly-by analysis

While most of these "real time" products achieve their scorching performance by moving data into memory, one high-performance product -- the StreamBase "stream-processing engine" from StreamBase Systems Inc. in Lexington, Mass. -- just grabs incoming data and analyzes it as it flies by.