TimesTen is an in-memory full-featured relational database management system, sharing many features of Oracle Database, supporting persistence and recoverability.

As an in-memory database, TimesTen provides high performance and very low response times and is widely used in communications, financial services, web applications.

Connecting to Oracle TimesTen Database

dotConnect for Oracle supports Oracle TimesTen in the OCI connection mode. To connect to Oracle TimesTen database you must install TimesTen Data Manager or TimesTen Client on your computer. TimesTen must be installed with the PL/SQL option, and PL/SQL must be enabled.

After this you need to create an ODBC Data Source, connecting to the necessary TimesTen database. Don't forget to set the PLSQL connection attribute to 1.

You may either add the corresponding entry to the Oracle Client tnsnames.ora file, and specify the created tnsname as the Data Source or Server or Host connection string parameter, or use the easy connect naming method to connect to an Oracle TimesTen database.

For easy connect naming method, the Data Source or Server or Host connection string parameter must be specified in the following format: "<host>/<service_name>:<server>", where:

• <host> is a host with the TimesTen database
• <service_name> is the name of the corresponding ODBC Data Source.
• <server> must be "timesten_client" (without quotes) if the corresponding ODBC Data source connects via TimesTen Client or "timesten_direct" (without quotes) if the corresponding ODBC Data source connects via TimesTen Data Manager.

TimesTen Support Limitations

There are the following limitations for TimesTen connections:

• Connecting to TimesTen is not supported in the Direct mode.
• Advanced Queuing (AQ) is not supported
• The OracleLoader class uses Array Binding instead of the direct path load interface, and has limited functionality
• Transparent Application Failover is not supported
• User-defined types (UDT) are not supported, and accordingly the OracleObject and NativeOracleObject classes are not supported too
• The OracleBFile, OracleIntervalYM, and OracleXml classes are not supported
• The OracleLob class is not supported for Oracle TimesTen 11g Release 1, but is supported for Oracle TimesTen 11g Release 2
• The OracleDatabase class is not supported
• The OracleDependency class is not supported
• The OracleGlobalization class is not supported
• The OracleTrace class is not supported
• Views are listed in the Server Explorer without their columns
• Oracle Package Wizard is not supported
• Oracle Object Wizard is not supported
• ASP.NET Web-providers are not supported
• LinqConnect is not supported
• Sync Framework is not supported
• Workflow Foundation is not supported

The following Entity Framework features are not supported for TimesTen databases:

• Entity Developer
• Creating autoincrement Identity columns using Code First / Code-First Migrations
• Adding views to the model when creating a model with EDM Wizard/EDM Designer in Visual Studio 2008 SP1, 2010, 2012, and Entity Framework Tools for Visual Studio 2012/2013/2015/2017 using Database First approach
• Model First approach

See Also

OracleCommand Class  | OracleConnection Class