the big switch
after going thru many several programming languages and databases in my
20+ years of working with computers, seldom do i find myself excited
with the plethora of tools that have been coming out of late,
WinFX nothwithstanding. maybe i'm just getting a little bit
older or have i just become jaded with all the hype and promises
which turn out to be too good to be true.
the first time i read about db4o i never really bothered with it since
it was more of a java thing back then - not anymore. it has
become a mature cross platform OODBMS for java or .NET/ MONO, linux or
windows. db4o is actually being positioned as an
embedded/mobile database but more and more people are actually using it
for desktop and ASP.NET applications. include me on that list.
what i really like about using db4o as a backing store is it frees you
from making compromises with your business models, which normally
happens when you're designing apps with an sql database as backing
store. this side effect is like a breath of fresh air to harried
developers like me.
the db4objects June newsletter claims that version 5.4 which is currently in development, sports a new B-Tree index architecture, and object marshaller. As a result:
- You can store up to 250 million objects with a constant RAM
consumption of less than 40 MB and a constant insert performance of
8,000 objects per second -- measured on a slow hard disc! Previously,
Version 5.2 had shown drastic insert performance drops and RAM
consumption over 300 MB once one attempted to commit more than 10
million objects, which consequently marked the boundaries for the
feasible scalability of version 5.2.
- 100,000 objects have
been stored successfully with a constant RAM consumption of less than
2MB, a scenario typical for handhelds, making db4o one of the most
powerful and best-performing persistence solutions on resource
constrained devices.
- Measured with 10 million objects,
commit performance of class indexes is now even 11x faster than with
version 5.2, running at 400 milliseconds instead of 4.5 seconds on a
slow hard disc!
these figures are awesome!