InterSystems IRIS for Hybrid Transactional-Analytical Processing

This report describes a performance benchmark of InterSystems IRIS® in comparison with other data platforms. The test profiles combined simultaneous transactional ingestion and analytical queries of incoming data, an instance of highly efficient, real-time, concurrent, and hybrid transactional-analytical processing.

The benchmark simulates workloads that have been designed to match typical production-like deployments, updating and superseding similar but older benchmarks. Details of the workload simulations are described in the methodology and hardware sections of this report.

The 2025.2 version of InterSystems IRIS demonstrated performance significantly superior to that of the near-competitor databases tested, confirming the strongly positive judgment of data platform analysts such as Gartner and Forrester.

Historically, transactional applications (OLTP, based on real-time data) and analytical applications (OLAP, based on historical and other non-real-time data) were implemented on separate architectures and platforms. But as organizations started to make use — in real time — of the insights gleaned from their data, new solutions emerged that embodied hybrid transactional-analytical processing (HTAP). Transactional-analytical applications simultaneously support rapid ingestion of data from a variety of sources and sophisticated concurrent analytics. Traditional data platforms struggle to meet such needs. In recent years, however, hybrid platforms have been available and adopted across use cases and industries.

The InterSystems IRIS data platform is designed for development and execution of high-performance HTAP applications. It combines in-memory performance with highly optimized disk storage and uniquely intelligent and distributed data-aware caching that eliminates the need to duplicate entire data sets in memory or on disk. Applications built on InterSystems IRIS can ingest dense streams of transactional data, while simultaneously executing complex analytics.

This benchmark report presents the results of speed tests that compare how InterSystems IRIS executes a set of HTAP workloads with several competitor databases.