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This article is about a database system. For cache memory, see Cache.
Caché is a proprietary M technology-based database management system from InterSystems. InterSystems uses the term "postrelational" to describe its characteristics. Caché provides SQL, Object and multidimensional access to the same data.
Caché runs on Windows, different flavors of Unix, Mac OS X and OpenVMS platforms.
Internally Caché stores data in b-tree based multidimensional arrays (otherwise known as MUMPS globals, although InterSystems prefers to avoid using the name MUMPS). In most applications, however, Object and/or SQL access methods are used. Caché ObjectScript and Caché Basic can be used to develop application's business logic. External interfaces include Native Object Binding for C++, Java, EJB, ActiveX. JDBC and ODBC for relational access as well as high-performance Direct interfaces. XML and Web Services are also supported.
The noticeable customers of this DBMS are top US hospitals, who run their EMR systems on Caché, financial institutions like Ameritrade and others.
The main competitors are other high-end vendors such as DB2 from IBM, MS-SQL from Microsoft and Oracle.
In comparison to relational systems, in similar applications, Caché can often provide significantly higher performance (or can support many more users with the same hardware resources). This is a characteristic it shares with other M technology-based systems. Sometimes the difference can be very dramatic. Against this should be weighed some loss in flexibility compared to relational systems; personnel recruitment and training issues that result from being outside of the current mainstream of database technology; and "lock-in" issues associated with the use of proprietary tools available from only a single vendor.