By Maria Trombly | Securities Industry News | June 17, 2005

This month, Silicon Valley database empire Oracle acquired TimesTen, a young, nimble company that makes super-fast, memory-resident databases. Last month, rival Sybase, the leading maker of databases for Wall Street applications, released its own real-time risk analytics platform.

It's no accident, but a symptom of the fact that real-time processing has come of age on Wall Street, experts say.

"Oracle and Sybase are validating this space," says Rebecca Wettemann, an analyst with Wellesley, Mass.-based Nucleus Research. "There can be some real benefit to real-time valuation of information, because the environment [on Wall Street] is continuously changing, and they have a high volume of transaction."

According to Andrea Klein, Oracle's VP for financial services strategy and marketing, Wall Street firms will be able to improve customer service and get rid of batch processing procedures that are almost as old as Eniac by moving to a real-time, in-memory database. "I personally have had calls from a number of customers who are very excited about this capability," Klein says. "Now that TimesTen has the breadth of Oracle, the securities industry is going to start to see a lot of change."

Because of its small size, TimesTen has been shut out of some highly sensitive markets in the past, says TimesTen marketing VP Tim Shetler. But no longer. "Now that Oracle is behind us and our product, there's no question that we're going to be around, and there will be increased investment," Shetler says.

TimesTen's flagship solution for Wall Street, the TimesTen Cache, works by copying the complete relational database into resident memory, instead of fetching data from disk storage as needed. This speeds up a database enormously, making it perfect for high-speed transaction processing, although it limits the size of the database that can be worked with, depending on how much memory can be attached to a given server. Once a transaction or session is completed, the data can then be pushed to an Oracle or other disk-based database for permanent storage.

And the Cache system can run on all the standard Unix and Linux configurations, boasts Shetler.