Terracotta is out to cure skimpy cache by making Ehcache really, really big, 1TB in fact, a size only a few people can use right now, but just you wait, it says, the day is upon us when practically everybody with a database will want it to be in-memory.

The biggest caches these days are still 100GB-200GB and they're a lot of work to build. Maybe there are two or three that hit 200 GB. The average, on the other hand, is more like sub-20 gigs.

Terracotta swears it's made it easy to store over a terabyte of data and hundreds of millions of entries in a single cache, so data retrieval is a whole lot faster and clouds and virtualization aren't bottlenecked.

See, clouds don't take well to data being outside on a disk somewhere. They want it snug inside.

The new engorged Ehcache 2.2 works out-of-the-box, no changes to any application code. It's also supposed to be a cinch to configure. How hard can two lines of code be? And there's a new management console that's supposed to simplify application scale and improve performance by enhancing visibility and control. It's the same Ehcache as before just bigger unless you count the added Java Authentication and Authorization support that provides LDAP authentication support for tight integration to corporate user management systems. That's different.

CEO Amit Pandey calls the widgetry "snap-in" and claims that "to achieve this kind of scale out-of-the-box, with so little effort, is unprecedented." It's been in beta test for a while with people with big databases. He says he had 400-450 beta requests.

It's aimed initially at the tens of thousands of mainstream apps in the Global 2000 that use Ehcache or Hibernate.