Getting Real (Time)

As an industry, we may be on the cusp of a wave of next-generation applications that will probably need to run as close to real time as possible. The question that raises is whether our existing database technologies can keep pace?

Enter Michael Stonebraker, the CTO of a Lexington, Mass.-based startup called StreamBase Systems, and the person credited with being the original architect of the Ingres database as well as the former CTO of Informix Software.

MICHAEL VIZARD Can be reached at (516) 562-7477 or via e-mail at mvizard@cmp.com.

Stonebraker has teamed up with Barry Morris, the former CEO of Iona Technologies, who left that company abruptly when Iona's founder reclaimed the helm as chief executive.

The core idea behind StreamBase, which isn't really a database in the traditional sense of the technology, is that there are new classes of applications that will require the help of a server that sits in memory to process and correlate all the data streaming through the application.

Existing databases are too slow to keep up with these applications and therefore represent a bottleneck. By leveraging the StreamBase server, it becomes easier to run financial and telecommunications applications faster. But StreamBase's potential impact doesn't end with power-hungry applications such as these. A new technology, such as RFID, will require systems that can correlate data in real time if it is ever to fulfill its promise of tracking individual products rather than large palettes or containers.

StreamBase also has implications for security software, which is beginning to strain under the weight of coordinated blended attacks that are being launched from multiple parts of the globe.

What Stonebraker and the StreamBase team have developed is essentially a new way of capturing data and executing code against it in real time. If you couple StreamBase with relatively inexpensive 64-bit systems with lots of virtual memory, the ability to create a new class of realtime applications may be here sooner than we anticipate. That may pose some interesting issues for database titans such as IBM, Oracle and Microsoft, which may soon find themselves facing a new competitor with a very familiar face.

What implications does StreamBase have for you? I can be reached at (516) 562-7477 or via e-mail at mvizard@cmp.com.