InterSystems Globals and GT.M Compared

InterSystems, producers of the Caché database, have launched Globals, a fast, proven, simple, flexible and free databases, 2 months ago. But after the initial announcement, I couldn’t find and didn’t hear much about it. This until Rob Tweed[1] and K.S.Bhaskar[2] took the time to explained some of the differences between InterSystems Globals and GT.M, both systems being implemented on top of the MUMPS Global Persistent Variables .

Rob Tweed: I’m not an InterSystems person — simply a long-term user and advocate of Global-storage based technologies of which GT.M, Cache and now InterSystem Globals are members, and someone who has long believed that it’s a significantly under-valued database technology, and unfortunately and sadly not known about or understood sufficiently in the wider database/IT world. However, the rise of NoSQL has provided some renewed chance of rediscovery by a wider community of developers, which I’m keen to encourage.

With respect to a comparison with BigTable etc, I guess all of us in the Global-storage technology user communities have looked at many of the new NoSQL technologies and thought it’s deja vu all over again :-) Perhaps this paper[3] that I co-authored might help to at least provide a comparative positioning against the “mainstream” NoSQL databases.