The latest release of Oracle Coherence, 3.7, has added support for solid state disks and memory optimization for improved performance.

Coherence is an in-memory data grid server that lets you spread a single application or database across multiple Java application servers. It is designed for uses such as real-time data analysis, in-memory grid computations, parallel transaction and event processing, and application grid computing. Coherence 3.7 and its Elastic Data capabilities have been optimized to run on Oracle's Exalogic servers.

The reason why support for solid state disks is called Elastic Data is that the Coherence 3.7 lets you allocate a specified amount of memory to a data set, and any data that can’t be accommodated in the memory is placed in flash storage, so data is managed transparently across a cluster and between memory and flash. Coherence uses Java NIO for this, and Oracle says benchmarks have shown almost no performance difference between the memory and the flash storage.

In the previous release of Coherence you had to define the amount of memory for each data set on a cache-by-cache basis.

Coherence also now has enhanced Extend client libraries so that applications written in multiple languages have to access Coherence. Coherence Extend provides access to the core Coherence cluster to data consumers such as desktops, remote servers, and computers located across WAN connections. Extend clients can be created for Java, .NET, and C++, and have access to the same API as the standard Coherence API without being full data members of the cluster.