I learned about it a little late, but Oracle bought TimesTen, a company that specialises in real-time databases. The before-Oracle version already had the ability to act as a cache for an Oracle-database, which is perhaps why Oracle was so interested in them.
You can read about it on Oracle’s website, or you can browse to TimesTen‘s website.
You can use TimesTen from Java (JDBC) or via the ODBC Direct Connect driver (which obviously fakes to be an ODBC-driver). And having an ODBC-driver means you can use it with a number of programming-languages (Delphi, the .NET framework, scripting-langauges, whatever). I think I need to check it out!