Wow, this one’s good. InterSystems Caché Jalapeño Spices Up Persistence

Caché, from InterSystems, is the object database that runs SQL faster than relational databases. … Caché’s upcoming “Jalapeño” technology that lets you persist POJOs without the tedium of object-relational mapping.

Sounds good… real good. But I just hope, it is not a “too good to be true” thing. The claim of faster than relational databases is a bit bold. Maybe, I would instantly bite if the “faster” meant faster development, rather than faster runtime.

What’s the benchmark results? How many transactions per second did they perform to claim this? How large are the test data? How diverse are the test cases? Does it cluster? Does it support GRID computing? What about failover? Too good to be true, but performance isn’t the only thing that matters… Surely, I wouldn’t immediately train my sights to this as an enterprise solution if I need to devise one. I believe that Oracle and DB2 UDB still rule the roost in this aspect.

Though I am sceptic on the performance claims, the promise of persistence without mapping is a welcome innovation (but hey, EJB 3 with annotations does this, right?).

My recommendation: none for the moment… I haven’t seen the product first hand.