Product Snapshot: Cach5

September 23, 2002 — The financial services industry—banks, mutual fund companies, brokerage houses—demands data systems with both impeccable reliability and lightning performance. Indeed, mission-critical financial applications must handle millions, perhaps billions, of transactions per day, all without failure.

In such an environment, the system will only be as reliable and speedy as its database. While not as well known to the general public as larger rivals such as Oracle, IBM, or Microsoft, in the financial services industry, Cambridge, Mass.-based InterSystems has established a strong reputation for its Caché post-relational database. (A post-relational database, as defined by InterSystems, features multidimensional data structures and multiple data access methods, as compared to traditional two-dimensional databases.)

Caché, first launched in 1997, combines relational, object, and multidimensional technologies in one database product. InterSystems has optimized Caché for both rapid application development and high-level performance.

“From its inception, Caché was targeted to enable developers to rapidly build and deploy high performance, highly scalable transaction processing applications,” says Paul Grabscheid, InterSystems’ vice president of strategic planning.

Dovetail Systems, a Fairfield, New Jersey-based company specializing in software products for large financial service companies, uses Caché in its Dovetail Payment System and Dovetail Settlement System, both written in 100 percent Java.

“Our products are mission-critical financial applications that move trillions of dollars a week at a typical customer. In these kinds of applications, we become the database of record, responsible for the transaction, so you need a fast, reliable database, which Caché certainly is,” says Dovetail’s CTO, Ken Condal.

Beyond the financial services industry, InterSystems has targeted the healthcare industry, with Caché deployed at such organizations as Johns Hopkins, Kaiser Permante, and Catholic Healthcare Partners. Indeed, healthcare has become one InterSystems’ most significant markets, representing 80 percent of InterSystems’ business, according to the company.

On September 23 InterSystems launched Caché 5, which features:

• Transactional Bit Map Indexing for real-time analytics in transactional environments. According to InsterSystems’ testing, Caché 5’s Transactional Bit Map Indexing boosts update performance on a 10-million-row table by 300 times compared to Oracle 9i.

  “High performance analytics for data warehousing has been around for years, but the poor update performance of the bit map indexes used in warehousing applications has made them unusable in transaction processing environments. Our new Transactional Bit Map Index technology makes CACHÉ the first database to address this need,” says Grabscheid.

• Web services support obviating the need for an application server. Caché 5 supports both .Net and Java Web services technologies out-of-the box, as well as bi-directional XML, SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), and WSDL (Web Services Description Language).
• Support for J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition), including automated Container Managed Persistence (CMP) and Bean Managed Persistence (BMP) features to aid performance. Moreover, Caché 5’s one-click EJB (Enterprise JavaBeans) technologies automates EJB creation.
• Enterprise Caché Protocol (ECP) that targets thin client environments with a new distributed concurrency engine.

Caché 5 is available now for 00 for the single-user version and ,000 for the multiple-user version. Supported platforms include Linux, Windows, HP Open VMS, and Unix and its variants.