Review: ANTs Data Server

ANTs Data Server 3.0, $25,000 per CPU
ANTs Software Inc.
Burlingame, California
(650) 692-0219 
http://www.ants.com

ANTs offer a database server with a unique niche in mind: they're after applications that are having serious performance problems because they have too darned much workload. Their target market is applications with thousands of concurrent processes all reading and writing; we're talking serious online transaction processing here. For these applications, ANTs can offer a serious (order of magnitude or more) performance boost, at a very reasonable price. It does this by combining an execution engine that avoids the need for locking with the ability to do almost everything in RAM (assuming your data fits in 64GB of RAM, and you can afford the appropriate hardware). They claim 5 to 15 times performance improvement over conventional high-end RDBMS systems.

ANTs 3.0, released in February, adds a batch of new features to an already-impressive core. For starters, there's a new flavor of stored procedure language here that's largely compatible with Microsoft's T-SQL. Combined with the existing support for PL-SQL, that means that applications can be migrated relatively easily from either Oracle or SQL Server to ANTs. You'll also find replication and support for high-speed processing of BLOB  and CLOB data, including searching of 3K bytes of descriptive data at high speed. You can run the server on Windows, Linux or Solaris servers, and get to it with ODBC or JDBC, which means that you ought to be able to hook into it easily from most existing applications. There's also experimental support in this release for using ANTs as an embedded database.

The folks at ANTs are pretty darned sure of themselves. How sure? Well, if you're a serious sales prospect, and you're willing to devote some resources to work with them, they guarantee to convert your existing T-SQL or PL-SQL application to work on ANTs in two weeks, at no charge to you. If you prefer, you can download an evaluation copy of ANTs 3.0 and try it out for yourself (you'll want some serious hardware - think multiple CPUs and caching RAID controllers - in either case). The evaluation guide and manuals are plenty clear enough to get you started, and I didn't have any trouble getting ANTs up and running on my own baby test network, though I don't happen to have thousands of clients hammering on any of my applications to really stress it out with.

Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.