I keep hearing that FireBird has an in memory mode, but I can't find a single reference to it.
Any ideas?

Funny you should mention that, I went looking this morning for more details about the in-memory mode and didn't find anything either. I'll let you know if I turn anything up.

Thanks, Ike. I'd love to see more posts on this. I'm not very familiar with in-memory databases. In my new gig, we use 9i/10g as the RDBMS of choice (well, in reality, there's no choice). I'd be curious if/how TimesTen could be used a cache of relational data sitting in front of a full instance of Oracle.

Bob, TimesTen can be used for exactly that. TimesTen has a pre-built "Cache Connect to Oracle" option that allows it to serve as cache to reduce latency and increase throughput of Oracle Database. See http://www.oracle.com/database/timesten-cache-connect.html

Disclaimer: I work for Oracle.

Thanks Rex. After reading through a couple of the white papers and overview documents I'm pretty impressed with what Timesten offers. Not only does it have the Cache Connect to Oracle but it also supports replication among multiple running instances of Timesten which would come in handy if you were scaling out at the application server layer. The only downside is that Oracle doesn't offer a native .NET provider, so if you want to use it you'll have to drop down some cash ($1500) for the TankerdSoft provider. It definitely sounds like it has a lot of potential though so I'd definitely give it a look to see if it might be a good fit for your scenario.

What might be interesting for us to look into speaking of replication, is if and how it ties into Oracle RACs as that is the Replication/Failover strategy of choice for Oracle.

Is the $1500 a one time fee? Its not per CPU is it?

The $1500 is a one time fee. I definitely think we should look into Oracle RAC's :)

Steve,

I would be very interested in hearing your thoughts and experiences on TimesTen. My teams has just completed an evalutation of SQLite vs. VistaDB and I'm throwing them back into the fray to evaluation TimesTen as well.

Email me or continue posting your experiences via the blog.

Thanks.

To the person who asked about FireBird in-memory, I just found this: http://blog.vyvojar.cz/jirka/archive/2007/01/28/firebird-embedded-and-net.aspx