#Caché

Introduction

Experts estimate that 85% of all data exists in unstructured formats – held in e-mails, documents (contracts, memos, clinical notes, legal briefs), social media feeds, etc. Where structured data typically accounts for quantitative facts, the more interesting and potentially more valuable expert opinions and conclusions are often hidden in these unstructured formats. And with massive volumes of text being generated at unprecedented speed, there’s very little chance this information can be made useful without some process of synthesis or automation.

Introduction

To overcome the performance limitations of traditional relational databases, applications - ranging from those running on a single machine to large, interconnected grids - often use in-memory databases to accelerate data access. While in-memory databases and caching products increase throughput, they suffer from a number of limitations including lack of support for large data sets, excessive hardware requirements, and limits on scalability.

Executive Overview

One way financial services firms can improve their operational efficiency is to revamp their data management infrastructure. Creating a central repository for data that is used by multiple applications can ensure data consistency and quality across the enterprise, ease integration bottlenecks, and lower the number of failed trades.However, different applications have different database usage patterns. To satisfy them all, any central data repository must:

Customers who switch to Caché from relational databases report that their average performance is up to 20 time faster, running on the same hardware, with no changes to the application. What is it about Caché that lets applications run so fast?

Introduction

By now, anybody working in the technology sector will have heard of Cloud computing. But the concept is increasingly being paid attention to outside of IT departments, with growing recognition among boardlevel executives of the potential of this range of innovations. Frequently, senior personnel are hearing stories about how the Cloud helps organizations reduce costs, boost efficiency and expand their operations, so they’ll be excited about what the Cloud can do for them.

Abstract

In a recent benchmark test of an application based on InterSystems Caché, a sustainable rate of 8.9million database accesses/second, with peaks of 16.9 million database accesses/second, was achieved. These results were from a test performed on a connected system of eight applications servers, using Intel Xeon 5570 processors, and running Linux as the operating system. This benchmark shows that: