Originally designed and implemented at Hewlett-Packard labs in Palo Alto, California, TimesTen spun out into a separate startup in 1996 and was acquired by Oracle Corporation in 2005.

It can also be configured in replicated active/standby pairs of databases (TimesTen Classic) providing high availability and microsecond response time.

This allows its internal search and data management algorithms used to be simplified, resulting in very low response times even on commodity hardware.

Transactions allow data to be manipulated with appropriate levels of atomicity and isolation; TimesTen supports all standard ACID properties expected of relational databases.

Applications access TimesTen databases using standard relational APIs such as ODBC, JDBC, OCI, and ODPI-C.

In addition TimesTen databases can be replicated to multiple machines to provide for high availability and disaster recovery.

Direct mode allows applications running on the same machine as the database to avoid network stack and context switching overheads.

Applications can then read from and write to cache groups, and all data modifications will then be synchronized with the corresponding Oracle Database tables.

The TimesTen Classic replication mechanism enables a highly available system by sending database updates between two or more hosts.

TimesTen was founded in HP labs by Marie-Anne Neimat,[5] Sherry Listgarten, Kurt Shoens and Kevin Wilkerson, under the name of "Smallbase".

In 1996, the product was spun off into a separate venture capital funded startup company based in Mountain View, California under the leadership of CEO Jim Groff.

The product became popular for telecommunications equipment, as response times in the milliseconds or even microseconds were required for applications like packet switching.