(September 23, 2002) - InterSystems Corporation has recently announced the launch of version 5 of their object-oriented database system, CACHÉ. This database is considered to be faster than either Oracle or SQL Server and is the leading database within the healthcare industry. It is most often used "behind the scenes" by ISVs as a licensed part of their own software's infrastructure.

Points of interest to .NET developers:

1) CACHÉ has its own language and IDE for creating stored procedures within the database. However, the language is very similar to Visual Basic 6 and the IDE is very similar to Visual Studio.

2) CACHÉ has an ODBC driver (in addition to a 100% pure JDBC driver) to allow access from your Microsoft-platform code. There is no managed provider at the moment, but InterSystems does claim to have one in the works.

3) Everything within the CACHÉ system, including the DB engine itself, is a COM object. You may, therefore, use COM to access anything within CACHÉ.

4) Version 5 of CACHÉ is introducing broad support for Web services, so you can now extend object-based access to anything within your CACHÉ databases across the enterprise using SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI.

Pricing starts at $200 for a single-user development version and $1000 for multi-user versions.

See www.intersystems.com for more information.