Driving demand

Jim Groff, a senior vice president at Oracle and the former CEO of TimesTen Inc., says two broad trends are driving the migration of in-memory databases from niche markets, such as securities trading, into more mainstream computing. The first, on the hardware side, is the rise of inexpensive 64-bit microprocessor architectures that lift the old limit of 2GB of physical memory available to Wintel applications.

The second, in software, is "the emergence of an intelligent middle tier of the enterprise architecture," Groff says. In the middle tier, "where application servers live, where middleware lives, where business activity monitoring and Web services live, that's where there's a tremendous amount of action in enterprise IT today."

And all that action entails a lot of data queries and exchanges among application servers, database servers and storage networks. "The scaling can't keep up; the back end can't keep up," Groff says. "So intelligently caching the right information in the middle tier is emerging as a key solution." Cached information could include key customer data pulled forward into a customer call center at the beginning of a call so that common questions can be answered without delays, he explains.

Streaming technology will move into supply chain systems when radio- frequency identification tags go from the pallet level to the individual item level and a warehouse or store generates huge volumes of product-movement transactions, says Mike Stonebraker, founder and CTO of StreamBase Systems. "Long term, the huge market will be in the area of sensor networks. Everything on the planet of material significance may be tagged," he says.