Performance Comparison of InterSystems Caché and Oracle in a Data Mart Application

Abstract

A global provider of mobile telecommunications software tested the performance of InterSystems Caché and Oracle as the database in a simulated data mart application. They found Caché to be 41% faster than Oracle at building a data mart. When testing the response time to SQL queries of the data mart, Caché's performance ranged from 1.8 times to 513 times faster than Oracle.

Introduction

Telecommunications companies, because they generate and must analyze enormous amounts of information, are among the most demanding database users in the world. In order to make practicable business intelligence solutions, telecommunications firms typically select key pieces of raw data to be loaded into a "data mart", where it is indexed and aggregated in various ways before being made available for analysis. Even so, the data marts in question may be hundreds of gigabytes in size. Database performance, both in the creation of the data mart, and in the query response time of the data mart, is critical to the timely analysis of information, and ultimately to the ability of the enterprise to identify and act upon changes in their business environment.

This paper presents the results of comparative performance tests between InterSystems Caché and Oracle. They were performed by a global provider of mobile telecommunications software, as they evaluated database technology for incorporation into a new business intelligence applications relating to mobile phone usage.