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TimesTen is a powerful, easy to use and fast in-memory database.
July 13, 2016

TimesTen is a powerful, easy to use and fast in-memory database.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with TimesTen

TimesTen is being used as an in-memory relational database for a multi-threaded real-time application. This application reads, writes and updates the data in TimesTen. TimesTen is also being used by a front-end graphical user interface to allow users to view the data and create reports. One problem with TimesTen is slow performance for larger sized tables and slow initial loading of TimesTen database. Another problem that was discovered is that TimesTen is not as fast as caching data using STL maps.
  • With basic database experience, TimesTen has a very short learning curve.
  • The installation and setup is easy and straightforward. The command line instructions are easy to follow.
  • The error logging mechanism is simple and efficient. The system log files are helpful in troubleshooting problems with using TimesTen.
  • The maintenance tools are user friendly and effective. Upgrading is easy and quick. TimesTen is almost a self-administrating database.
  • Provide better monitoring tools of TimesTen daemon, servers and connections.
  • Improved support for APIs. The libraries lack the necessary code for applications to customize for applications using TimesTen.
  • TimesTen has had a positive impact from a developer's perspective because implementing TimesTen is quick and easy. The benefits of TimesTen can be seen almost instantly. For instance, the application start up time is faster, the data is easy to maintain and the performance is fast for TimesTen clients.
  • TimesTen has had a positive impact for the business because it can be made accessible to users via a GUI. This gives users transparency to the data at any time.
  • The negative impact is that once the TimesTen database has grown too large, the application should move to using Oracle database or else it suffers from performance degradation and stability issues.
  • Sybase and Oracle
Sybase does not have an in-memory database until version 15 so TimesTen was ideal for caching data. TimesTen has reliable replication and backing up mechanisms.

Oracle takes longer to set up and use for most applications where as TimesTen is a smaller DBMS that is quick and easy to set up and use.

TimesTen can connect to Oracle for caching data so using Oracle as a backend makes sense.
TimesTen is well suited for applications using smaller data or smaller data stores and where transaction response times are not as business critical. TimesTen is good for applications already accessing Oracle and need to cache data for quick read/write operations. TimesTen is not appropriate for large data dependent applications or applications requiring fast response times. In these cases, using Oracle database or Exadata is better.