GT.M is the robust, high-performance, multi-paradigm database engine used by Sanchez Computer Associates Inc. for its Sanchez Profile® banking application server, and also available separately (see success stories*). Optimized for transaction processing, GT.M is also an application development platform and a compiler for the ANSI/ISO standard M language (also known as MUMPS®). The technology is widely used in several industries around the world, most notably financial services and healthcare.

The technology is a vetted, industrial strength platform for building high-throughput database applications for both host-based and client/server architectures. GT.M has several benefits as a database platform, which transaction-processing applications will find advantageous. They include:

• GT.M's database is typically 20 to 50 percent the size of equivalent databases on industry-standard SQL engines.
• GT.M's database supports full ACID (Atomic, Consistent, Isolated, Durable) transactions.
• It is substantially faster for transaction processing than traditional relational databases.
• GT.M's data dictionary is flexible and adapts easily to international requirements.
• SQL/ODBC access to GT.M databases is commercially available.

MUMPS' origins date back to 1966, when MUMPS (an acronym for Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System) was developed by the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Standardized as "M," the system was designed as an integrated programming language, programming environment, file system, operating system, and database. Its performance and flexibility permitted researchers to write complex database applications that could run on inexpensive minicomputers, instead of requiring expensive mainframes. Since the early 1970s, MUMPS has been a defacto standard in healthcare informatics.

M programmers relish M because the database is highly accessible with a familiar paradigm, built in string processing, and dynamic data typing along with familiar programming constructs such as "If Statements," "For loops," etc. Furthermore, with add-on tools from Sanchez (for Sanchez Profile®) and third parties (for other applications), it is possible to map a GT.M database onto a relational data dictionary, and provide access via standards such as SQL and ODBC/JDBC. Tools for object encapsulation and object oriented programming are also available.

In the 1980s an even more powerful technology alternative to prevailing M implementations evolved, called GT.M. This technology was developed by Greystone Technology Corp. Unlike traditional M systems that integrate the database and language subsystems in a closed architecture, GT.M was designed to have an open architecture, like a programming language such as C. Thus, M programs reside in normal ASCII files in the operating system (with a .m extension), and are compiled by a compiler into object files (with a .o or .OBJ extension) that are also normal files. However, GT.M was designed not to sacrifice the dynamic nature or performance of the M environment. To this day, transaction processing throughput occupies prime mind share of every engineer who works on GT.M.

Since GT.M's first deployment in 1986 on a VAX/VMS system in a major medical hospital, it has made notable inroads in the medical and financial industries. GT.M is licensed for use at over 1,000 institutions worldwide, ranging from small, community healthcare facilities and large teaching hospitals to some of the largest financial institutions in the world, such as the ING Group, and Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. Our clients entrust their mission critical applications to GT.M on IBM pSeries (formerly RS/6000) AIX, Compaq Alpha/AXP OpenVMS and Tru64 UNIX, HP-UX, Sun SPARC Solaris, and most recently GNU/Linux on popular x86 hardware. VAX/VMS continues to be supported.

In 1998, Sanchez purchased Greystone Technology Corp. and created the "Greystone Group," retaining its human capital and technical expertise. Sanchez continues to invest in growing the Greystone Group's software development team to respond to the market demands for this product as well as to meet Sanchez Profile needs.

Many innovations that are now commonplace in software technology, such as just-in-time compilation and dynamic linking have always been an integral part of GT.M. Others such as ACID (Atomic, Consistent, Isolated, Durable) transactions were incorporated into GT.M long before the competition. Today, the Greystone Group continues to innovate, pushing the technology envelope with unique functionality such as logical dual site operation, which allows an application like Sanchez Profile to offer 24x7 continuous availability, even if a data center is lost, or during an application upgrade that involves a database schema change.

With GT.M, Sanchez innovates not only technologically but also in product availability: the source code for GT.M on x86 GNU/Linux is available to the world under an open source license. Although that software is free for anyone to use, Sanchez' Greystone Group will offer maintenance contracts for users who want to use GT.M for commercial applications and want to purchase commercial support from Sanchez. On other platforms, GT.M is available as a traditionally licensed software product.

MUMPS(R) is a registered trademark of Massachusetts General Hospital Corporation.