TechEd Microsoft Ignite is an annual conference for developers and IT professionals hosted by Microsoft. It has taken place in several locations around the world. The first conference, then known as TechEd, happened in 1993 in Orlando, Florida, United S ...

1999 conference during its rollout of

Windows 2000 Windows 2000 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft and oriented towards businesses. It was the direct successor to Windows NT 4.0, and was released to manufacturing on December 15, 1999, and was official ...

Beta,

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...

introduced

COM+ Com or COM may refer to: Computing * COM (hardware interface), a serial port interface on IBM PC-compatible computers * COM file, or .com file, short for "command", a file extension for an executable file in MS-DOS * .com, an Internet top-level d ...

in-memory database (

IMDB IMDb (an abbreviation of Internet Movie Database) is an online database of information related to films, television series, home videos, video games, and streaming content online – including cast, production crew and personal biographies, p ...

) that provided an application with fast access to data through databases that supported

OLE DB OLE DB (''Object Linking and Embedding, Database'', sometimes written as OLEDB or OLE-DB), an API designed by Microsoft, allows accessing data from a variety of sources in a uniform manner. The API provides a set of interfaces implemented using ...

connectivity, without incurring the overhead associated with storing and accessing data to and from physical disks. "We're setting aside a cache of memory on the machine that's running your application for data from a database on another platform," says Michael Gross, product manager for COM+. "You'll be running your application on a Windows 2000 machine, but you may be actually accessing the data from an Oracle database on another platform." Microsoft did not intend to offer IMDB separately from COM+. "There are no current plans to productize the IMDB separately, or incorporate it into SQL Server in the near future," Gross says. He noted then that SQL Server 6.5 and

SQL Server 7.0 The history of Microsoft SQL Server begins with the first Microsoft SQL Server database product – SQL Server v1.0, a 16-bit relational database for the OS/2 operating system, released in 1989. Versions Detailed history Genesis On June 12, 19 ...

—along with Oracle7,

Oracle8 Oracle Database (commonly referred to as Oracle DBMS, Oracle Autonomous Database, or simply as Oracle) is a multi-model database management system produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation. It is a database commonly used for running online ...

Sybase Enterprise SAP ASE (Adaptive Server Enterprise), originally known as Sybase SQL Server, and also commonly known as Sybase DB or Sybase ASE, is a relational model database server developed by Sybase Corporation, which later became part of SAP AG. ASE wa ...

, Informix 8, and

Microsoft ADO Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washingt ...

—would be able to serve as back-end data stores for the IMDB. Microsoft's IMDB also supports the

for an

ODBC In computing, Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) is a standard application programming interface (API) for accessing database management systems (DBMS). The designers of ODBC aimed to make it independent of database systems and operating systems. A ...

provider.

Competition

However, soon after the rollout of

, several already delivering IMDB vendors had come forward with main-memory database systems that run on 32-bit Windows NT systems. TimesTen Performance Software—a Hewlett-Packard Co. spin-off—offered a main-memory database for Windows NT and Unix.

Angara Database Systems Inc. The Angara ( Buryat and mn, Ангар, ''Angar'', "Cleft"; russian: Ангара́, ''Angará'') is a major river in Siberia, which traces a course through Russia's Irkutsk Oblast and Krasnoyarsk Krai. It drains out of Lake Baikal and ...

also had demonstrated an RDBMS.

Empress Software An emperor (from la, imperator, via fro, empereor) is a monarch, and usually the sovereign ruler of an empire or another type of imperial realm. Empress, the female equivalent, may indicate an emperor's wife ( empress consort), mother (em ...

Inc.’s

Empress RDBMS An emperor (from la, imperator, via fro, empereor) is a monarch, and usually the sovereign ruler of an empire or another type of imperial realm. Empress, the female equivalent, may indicate an emperor's wife ( empress consort), mother (em ...

for Windows NT intermixed main memory and disk storage mechanisms to achieve increased speed.

Demise

Microsoft's

division's IMDB solution never made it past

Beta release, because it was squelched by Microsoft's SQL Server division for several reasons: * Initial tests showed that Microsoft's IMDB performed better with Oracle7 and

than with Microsoft's products SQL Server 6.5 and

and ADO. * It was a skunkworks project produced by Microsoft's COM+ division, and Microsoft's SQL Server division had more political clout. * Proven competition TimesTen

References

{{Reflist Microsoft software