Derby 10.5 - in-memory support!

I had lunch today with a bunch of old buddies from Sun, including Rick Hillegas and Francois Orsini from the Java DB/Derby team. They confirmed rumors I had been hearing that 10.5 (currently in release candidate mode) has support for running purely in-memory, and that some operations are running 1000 times faster than on disk.

Why is this interesting? Well, think of the scenario where you need to cache data with your web server instances so that your client requests can access the data they need locally, in-memory. This is a very common need to meet the scalability and performance requirements of web applications.

The problem is, most of the caches out there today are simple key/value hash maps.

What JavaDB in memory gives you is an in-memory cache that gives you all the expressive power of SQL. You can run SQL queries over your cache, or use Hibernate or JPA, rather than being limited to key-based lookup and building your own secondary indexes.

And then there are interesting features such as Java stored procedures and table functions, which I can envision being very powerful and useful in an implementation of an in-memory SQL-based cache.

So take a look at the 10.5 release candidate (or wait until 10.5 releases). It may be just what you need.