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TIBCO ActiveSpaces

Score7 out of 10

13 Reviews and Ratings

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What is TIBCO ActiveSpaces?

ActiveSpaces from TIBCO supports an application infrastructure.

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Who Buys & Uses TIBCO ActiveSpaces

TIBCO ActiveSpaces Reviews

What users are saying about TIBCO ActiveSpaces.
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Implementing virtual memory using TIBCO ActiveSpaces

Incentivized
Verified User
Employee in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using TIBCO ActiveSpaces for storing user session details. With the help of TIBCO ActiveSpaces we are able to store user session in active memory which helps minimize calls to server for authentication every now and then. This saves time and enables user to login quickly. Apart from user session, we are also storing user role details in TIBCO ActiveSpaces.

Pros

  • Easy to scale
  • Support for many hardware and software platforms
  • Easy to implement

Cons

  • Consumes more memory
  • Not suitable for complex architecture, can lead to performance issues
  • Debugging can be difficult sometimes

Return on Investment

  • TIBCO ActiveSpaces has helped improved overall performance as it stores data in memory and quickly fetches the data
  • Cost of licensing and storage used by TIBCO ActiveSpaces is not very high
  • TIBCO ActiveSpaces has helped to remove redundant data by providing one source of truth (data which is stored in TIBCO ActiveSpaces is master data)

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Oracle Database

Other Software Used

Notepad++, SoapUI Open Source, supported by SmartBear, Postman

TIBCO's Cache

Incentivized
Mani VenugopalView profile
Senior Technical Consultant in Information Technology at TalkTalk (501-1000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Tibco ActiveSpaces is an excellent caching tool. With good design, we can haven a efficient cache layer, that can respond to business needs in sub-seconds (milliseconds) rather than seconds / minutes to respond. This is specially useful for improving the efficiency of the services used in customer interactions.. like login, serving billing information, serving the customer's service usage and any other information customer is interested in accessing frequently.
  • System process can also use the ActiveSpaces . By caching the information frequently used by the system processes, the data cab be accessed more frequently. And without much disruptions.
  • If you are already using TIBCO tools, then ActiveSpaces is the right choice to use, as the product is well integrated with all the TIBCO Suite of products. ActiveSpaces integrates well with most common products like TIBCO BusinessWorks, TIBCO BusinessEvents etc.
  • ActiveSpaces can be easily deployed to a target (TIBCO) environment, with very little additional effort. Although there is an effort required to deploy them.
  • ActiveSpaces is supported by TIBCO BusinessWorks 5.13 and TIBCO BusinessWorks 6.x. Hence you are not forced to use any version of TIBCO BW, just because you have to use TIBCO ActiveSpaces.

Cons

  • ActiveSpaces 3.2 is not compatible with the latest version of TIBCO Business Event 5.x. And ActiveSpaces 2.x is not compatible with ActiveSpaces 3.x hence there is a big difference in the BusinessEvents supported version of AS and the latest.
  • ActiveSpaces takes more disc space and TIBCO does not offer data compression logic out of the box. Developers need to do extra coding to use java snippets to compress and decompress the payload. Although the data compression gives must better performance and speed to the system.
  • The compression and decompression API are not offered by TIBCO out of the box, which is a shame. These are so easy and simple to implement, still TIBCOdoes not provide them as an option out of the box.

Return on Investment

  • Developers with basic knowledge of TIBCO and general data knowledge can easily design and develop an ActiveSpaces based cached solution. As the ActiveSpaces concepts are very simple and easy to understand.
  • Some business areas can predict the high influx of a service usage during a certain period. Business will be highly rewarded if they can identify these business areas and provide a cached solution using TIBCO AS.
  • Again, this is not a TIBCO ActiveSpaces only advantage and this is true for any/all caching products.
  • Some examples for the previous points are
  • a. telecom company pre-loading (eager load) customer's usage for the last month, right before releasing/issuing the bills to the customers.
  • b. Airline industry loading the customer's itinerary a week before his travel start date. Hence the last minute scrambling to fetch the customer's itinerary travel plans can be avoided.

Alternatives Considered

Amazon ElastiCache, Couchbase and Oracle In-Memory Database

Other Software Used

TIBCO BusinessEvents, TIBCO Mashery

IMDG Spaces: Active or Not

Incentivized
Verified User
Strategist in Information Technology (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

  • Like all other IMDG solutions, Tibco ActiveSpaces provides a scalable and distributed cache solution, which is supposed to have high throughput and high availability.
  • As it is under the Tibco umbrella, it is seamlessly integrated with other Tibco products.
  • It breaks the traditional "local cache" boundary and limitation, instead unifies many "local physical memory" to create one huge "In-Memory Data Grid", and serves the data provider/consumer application logically as one "Memory Cloud."
  • A lot of non-frequently updated data can be cached in this IMDG, to allow fast access, which saves the I/O latency caused by many traditional file system-backed storage solutions.

Cons

  • TIBCO ActiveSpaces Tuple-based data structure is not flexible enough to support customized native data objects.
  • There is no secondary index option.
  • Doesn't provide "predicate based In-Grid distributed search and result aggregation."
  • only can be used as data cache, the node's only contribute memory but can not use the data partition owner node's computation power to apply the distributed computation customized by the user.
  • Cross data center replication (geographically) is a pain.
  • Encounter the performance issue when the data volume is huge, even according to the architecture design, linear scaling up should not have that issue.

Return on Investment

  • The cost of Tibco ActiveSpaces is quite high, while the added value it brought is not as we expected.

Alternatives Considered

Redis

Other Software Used

Redis, Apache Kafka, Docker