"I definitely think these products deserve to be more in the mainstream," says Curt A. Monash, a Computerworld columnist and president of Monash Information Services, an IT consultancy in Acton, Mass. But, he adds, a lot depends on how vendors position them and how hard big vendors like Oracle push them.

Says Monash, "These are products you'd buy for a limited group of applications, and for those, they can be very valuable. But they are not general-purpose systems."

Sidebar

The players

The following companies offer high-performance databases: