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 Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), releas ...

Beta,

Microsoft 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, Washing ...

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, ...

) 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—along with Oracle7, Oracle8, Sybase Enterprise, Informix 8, and Microsoft ADO—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. An ...

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. also had demonstrated an RDBMS. Empress Software Inc.’s Empress RDBMS 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 Oracle8 than with Microsoft's products SQL Server 6.5 and SQL Server 7.0 and ADO. * It was a

skunkworks Skunk Works is an official trademark for the Lockheed Martin Advanced Development Programs (formerly Lockheed Advanced Development Projects). Skunkworks or Skunk works may also refer to: * ''Skunkworks'' (album), alternative rock album by Bruce ...

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

References

{{Reflist Microsoft software