InterSystems: New Index Scheme Revs Search Speeds

The company said its Cache 5 database, slated to be unveiled Sept. 23, offers updated transactional bitmap indexes so the same database that stores and updates reams of transactional data can also be used for reporting and querying that data. Bitmap indexes process data to allow for easier searches and queries.

"[Traditional bitmap indexing was great for retrieval [and complex queries, but update performance was terrible. %85 We've taken transactional bitmap indexing from the data-warehouse world and applied it to the transactional world," said Paul Grabscheid, vice president of strategic planning at InterSystems, based here.

Cache 5 searches "huge sets of data much faster so you can perform transactions much faster," said Ken Billings, CIO of Molecular Pathology Laboratory Network, Maryville, Tenn. "Cache stores data much more efficiently than the row-column architecture."

Cache has its roots in the venerable MUMPS (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System) database developed years ago for health-care providers. Current customers include the Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic and Duke, UCLA and Johns Hopkins hospitals.

The new J2EE database fully supports XML and Web services, users said. "You can take the database now and make it accessible through any type of architecture,Visual Basic, Java, even Excel," said Cam Minges, chief software architect at Forum Solutions, a VAR subsidiary of Forum Credit Union, Indianapolis.

Pricing is based either on a named-user or concurrent-user basis and ranges from $300 to $1,000 per user depending on volume. The database runs on six flavors of Windows, all the major Unix variants and Linux.

InterSystems is recruiting ISV and other partners, Grabscheid said. The company has 775 active partners now and wants to add another 175 to 200 this year.