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'Caché' is a proprietary M technology-based database management system from InterSystems. InterSystems uses the term "postrelational" to describe its characteristics. Caché provides SQL, Object, and hierarchical access to the same data.
Caché runs on Windows, various flavors of Unix, Mac OS X, and OpenVMS platforms.
Internally Caché stores data in multidimensional arrays capable of carrying hierarchically structured data (otherwise known as MUMPS globals, although InterSystems prefers to avoid using the name MUMPS). In most applications, however, Object and/or SQL access methods are used. Caché ObjectScript and Caché Basic can be used to develop application's business logic. External interfaces include Native Object Binding for C++, Java, EJB, ActiveX. JDBC and ODBC for relational access as well as high-performance Direct interfaces. XML and web services are also supported. Caché Server Pages allows you to build and deploy Web applications that dynamically generate Web pages, typically using data from a Caché database.
Caché claims it is one of the fastest databases, and so is ideal for real-time applications. The reason for this claim is that it attempts to keep data in memory (hence the double meaning of cache!). By keeping the database in memory means it should have a significant speed advantage to databases who retrieve data from disk.
The noticeable customers of this DBMS are top US hospitals, who run their EMR systems on Caché, financial institutions such as Ameritrade, niche market software houses such as Ontario Systems, and others.

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Competitors

External links

Competitors

The main competitors are other high end vendors such as DB2 from IBM, MS-SQL from Microsoft, Oracle, and Sybase.
In comparison to traditional relational systems, in similar applications, Caché can often provide significantly higher performance (and/or can support many more users with the same or reduced hardware resources). This is a characteristic it shares with other M technology-based systems. Sometimes the difference can be very dramatic. Since M technology-based approaches to data persistence is not often taught to developers for creating/visualizing solutions, Caché also has a traditional relational interface that uses the M technology underneath to store tables, and indexes. This Relational metadata layer also can concurrently project an object oriented access to the same stored information to many different programming environments. Against these performance gains and multiple concurrent development concepts, should be weighed personnel recruitment and training issues that result from being outside of the better known database technologies; and "lock-in" issues associated with the exclusive use of the proprietary (M technology in the case of Caché) tools and extensions beyond standards available from only a single vendor.

External links

★ http://www.intersystems.com/

★ Searchable Caché documentation

★ cachemonitor.de - free SQL Query and Admin Tool for Caché