Oracle seeks faster grids with Tangosol buy

In buying Tangosol, Oracle wants to provide computer grids with linear performance and scalability improvements when users add servers to their configuration, Oracle Senior Vice President Thomas Kurian said on Friday morning.

With the plan, Oracle has high hopes in boosting grid performance in transactional environments.

"The unique thing that Tangosol does is it combines both performance improvements as well as scalability improvements at the same time," Kurian said. He would not comment on how much Oracle is paying for Tangosol.

Tangosol and its Coherence data grid software are slated to become part of Oracle next month as part of an agreement announced on Friday.

With the Tangosol buy, Oracle plans to integrate Coherence with Oracle products and also continue to sell it separately, Kurian said in an interview at TheServerSide Java Symposium in Las Vegas. Oracle has been focused on building out computer grids that combine the power of multiple servers for use in transactional systems that run its database and middleware.

"We're going to integrate with TimesTen (an in-memory database), we're going to integrate with our application server, [and] we've got ideas on how to integrate with our database," Kurian said.

Tangosol offers an in-memory data grid technology intended to meet demands for real-time data analytics, computer-intensive middleware, and high-performance transactions -- often referred to as Extreme Transaction Processing, Oracle said in its press statement.

In one instance, a bank that had a risk calculation program that had taken 50 days to run saw the time required drop to one hour after using Tangosol's technology, Tangosol President and CEO Cameron Purdy said. He also appeared at the symposium on Friday.

Tangosol becomes an Oracle business unit, Purdy said. The two companies already have shared customers using Oracle and Tangosol software together, Kurian said. 

In his presentation at the symposium on Friday, Kurian discussed Oracle's perspectives in computing, touching on the movement to combine service-oriented design pattern with event-driven architecture and users deploying Web 2.0 methods to access enterprise systems.

Trends in commodity hardware and storage and clustered, grid computing also were noted, as were Oracle's views on programming, in which the company supports JavaServer Faces, AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and HTML.