db4o Business Backgrounder
Download the Versant db4o Business Backgrounder as PDF
Versant, Corporation.
The Business Case for the Open Source Object Database
Object database technology was first introduced to the software industry with the advent
of object oriented programming languages. They have primarily beed used as an application
specific database for extreme scale systems and embedded systems where the typical DBA
activities need to be automated.
Developers continue to love object database technology because it is the ideal
match with object oriented (OO) environments like Java and .NET, and overcomes one
of developers' biggest hurdles: the inherent incompatibility between OO languages
and current mainstream relational databases (RDBMS) - the so-called "object-relational
(OR) mismatch."
An undeniable indicator of this mismatch is the emergence of so-called object-relational
mappers (ORM), such as Toplink and Hibernate. This solution "cures" the symptoms
of the OR mismatch by adding a layer into the software stack that automates the
tedious task of linking objects to tables. However, this approach creates a huge
drain on system performance, drives up software complexity, and increases the burden
on software maintenance, thus resulting in higher cost of ownership. While the mapper
solution may be feasible in large, administered datacenter environments, it is prohibitive
in distributed and zero-administration architectures such as those required for
embedded databases in client software, mobile devices, middleware or real-time systems.
Fortunately, ORM technology is largely founded on the principles of object persistence
lifecycle management developed by object database companies in the early and late 90's.
So, as the programming masses have adopted ORM technology, there has been and emmergence
of object database experts. Any Java or .NET programmer who is an expert in ORM technology
is also an expert in the use of an object database. The API approach is largely the same,
with the exception that there is no need to specify XML or Annotation based mapping.
Experts in ORM can now completely eliminate the mismatch with no extra effort to learn a
new technology.
The db4o product was started in 2004 to fill this OO database gap and give developers
a genuine choice when it comes to persisting data in OO environments. While OR mappers
can be helpful in cases where your applications have a relatively simple model and instead
of using a data warehouse you want to do adhoc reporting, db4o's native object database
provides for zero-administration and a lean implementation of embedded object-oriented
persistence. This harnesses the power of OOP to offer added flexibility and the ability
to create more feature-rich, competitive products while slashing development time and cost.
db4o is designed to be a universal product platform that is easy to learn and easy
to implement.
db4object's open source dual-license business model combines the power of the open
source development community with servicing commercial customers' needs for product
roadmap predictability, indemnification, single point of contact, and full tech
support with fast response times.
As a result, db4o is now one of the most popular object databases in the world.
This paper will provide an eye-opening look at db4o's market focus
and open source business model, and will illustrate why db4o's native object database
technology is here to stay.
The Market Opportunity
"Building Java applications that use relational databases is perhaps
the single most underestimated challenge in enterprise development today. More projects
are delayed, under-featured and difficult to maintain because of this underestimation.
The problem lies with the use of fundamentally different technologies - The object
world and the relational world do not match up." More...
--Oracle Corporation
"Using tables to store objects is like driving your car home and then
disassembling it to put it in the garage. It can be assembled again in the morning,
but one eventually asks whether this is the most efficient way to park a car."
--Esther Dyson
The emergence of distributed data architectures - in networks, on clients and embedded
in "smart" products such as cars or medical devices - is forcing companies in an
array of industries to look beyond traditional RDBMS technology for an improved
way to deal with object persistence. They are searching for a solution that can
handle an enormous number of often complex objects, offers powerful replication
and querying capabilities, and slashes development time. This is especially true
for updating software versions and object models that must be distributed over a
large installed base without the need for an administrator.
The major reason for using relational databases today is legacy software, i.e. retaining
old enterprise data and the set of existing applications relying on it. But beyond
the simple persistence and sustainence, there are a multitude of enterprise applications,
consumer products and other examples of client-side persistence for which conventional
database technology falls short when OO languages like Java and .NET are used. Here
db4o's technology offers new levels of performance and functionality.
Currently the most salient solution for the object-relational mismatch is the use
of an object-relational mapper (ORM), such as Hibernate, a popular product that
"wraps" relational databases to store objects directly. But
benchmark results demonstrate that this type of solution is only viable
if resources are abundant and performance is not critical.
As a new-generation object database, native to both Java and .NET, db4o eliminates
the traditional trade-off between performance and object-orientation. Recent PolePosition
benchmark results show that db4o outperforms object-relational mappers by orders
of magnitude, up to 44x in use cases with complex object models.
db4o uniquely offers object persistence with zero-administration, cross-platform
applicability to Java and .NET, object-oriented querying, replication and browsing
capabilities, and a small footprint of only some ~600KB. Its single library (JAR/.DLL)
is easily deployed and can run in the same memory process as the application, making
it a fully integrated and tunable portion of the product.
Customers, analysts, and experts agree that the db4o object database is one of the
world's best and most popular choice, because it stores object natively, with just
one line of code and not only eliminates the overhead and resource consumption of
an ORM, but is also much leaner, faster and easier to integrate into an OOP development
than any RDBMS.
The target environments for db4o are therefore persistence architectures where there
is no database administrator present and no RDBMS legacy, i.e. primarily on
equipment, mobile and
desktop clients, and in the
middleware. db4o is also applicable in the enterprise data center on
servers, but used less often here due to the prevalence of legacy data and
systems. Typical industries of db4o customers include
transportation, networks,
natural sciences,
industrial,
consumer, and enterprise
applications, among many others. Existing customers range from world-class leaders
like Boeing,
Bosch,
Intel,
Ricoh, and
Seagate to
a broad range of highly innovative start-up companies - in the Americas, EMEA, and
Asia-Pacific.
To accommodate this wide field of interest, db4o adopted a dual license model, which
supplies a full version of db4o either under the General Public License (GPL) for
the open source community, or under a conventional proprietary
license for commercial product developers who wish to embed db4o into their non-GPL
commercial products.
The embedded DBMS market grew 15% to $1.86 billion in 2004, according to
IDC, and is expected to grow to $3.18 billion in 2009. Versant is confident
that its business model, focus, and unique product benefits will make it the leading
technology in this segment, and while decreasing unit prices, will also dramatically
increase the technology's reach and number of installed units within the next few
years.
In a free IDC report "Embedded Databases: The Invisible Engine That
Could", Carl Olofson, Research Director of IDC's Application Development
and Deployment Group, answers further questions which were posed by Versant, then on
behalf of its independent software vendor (ISV) customers.
Versant's db4o Vision
As devices become "smarter" and enterprises increasingly mobile, relational databases
slowly sink to their knees, and the need for a lightweight, apt object-oriented
persistence solution becomes increasingly urgent. Likewise, on the other end of the
spectrum, as data grows, concurrency increases and businesses strive to become real-time,
relational databases struggle to deliver and object databases such as the
Versant Object Database step in to
deliver unprecedented performance and scalability.
Versant and the db4o team provides OO developers with a choice beyond relational
databases when it comes to persistence. Our db4o vision as a company is to become the
mainstream persistence architecture on all mobile and embedded devices running on
Java or .NET.
The template for this consolidation process can be found in the rise of embedded
Linux as a real-time operating system (RTOS). Linux consolidated a wide array of
proprietary, closed-source RTOS offerings to one common, low-cost and universally
accepted platform offering huge benefits to users in terms of product commoditization,
interoperability and liberty from high, proprietary licensing fees.
We believe that the availability of a popular and embeddable open source
object database will have a similar, profound effect on the IT industry and the
innumerable enterprises that rely on it to move forward. db4o not only alleviates
the pain OO developers suffer in current projects, but also opens a world of new
applications, products, and smart devices.
As a client-side, embeddable database, db4o is particularly suited to be deployed
in devices with embedded software.
Seagate, the world's leading hard disc drive and consumer storage supplier, gave its Mirra Sync and Share Personal Server a boost in efficiency and performance with db4o. Mirra Chief Architect Bret Savage said: "I would definitely endorse db4o's use due to its performance, both in terms of memory overhead and transactional latency; its scalability in terms of how many items you can put in the database; and its solid reliability."
Electronics giant BOSCH Sigpack,
one of the world market leaders in packaging technology, reports that they have
been able to cut time-to-market for their products by about 10% when using db4o,
because db4o can facilitate the complex object models required by their high-performance
packaging robots with ease.
INDRA Sistemas, the leading Spanish
IT and Defense Systems company, has built a new real-time control system for Spain's
high speed bullet train AVE, using db4o as the core of the realtime database. No
other system was able to handle the incredible load of processing over 200,000 heterogeneous
objects per second in a safety-critical environment.
Ricoh Company, Ltd., the leading maker of digital office solutions with annual sales over $17 billion, forged a partnership with Versant to develop Ricoh's future product development platform, which includes db4o. "db4o provides a persistence solution for our broad range of technical challenges and for our stringent quality standards," said Tetsuo Ito, Software Team Lead at Ricoh. "After a long period of evaluation, we found that db4o has the flexibility to fit our cutting-edge architectures, which aim to achieve better productivity in our object-oriented software development."
Versant and the db4o team is using the open source model as a strategic
tool to enable focus on the right target market - embeddable databases - and by
benefiting from the mainstream adoption of OO programming environments, marked by
Microsoft's .NET platform and C# programming language releases in 2002, validating
Java's OO approach.
Following a four-year development period with some 100 pilot customers helping to
create a technologically stable platform, db4o was released under a dual open source/commercial
license in November 2004.
The power of the open source model has given Versant a jumpstart to achieve its
vision at warp speed: In the first two years, db4o has realized more than 1,000,000 downloads
and is now driven by a registered user community of more than 60,000 Java and .NET developers. It is
already the world's most popular object database, in essentially no time.
Open Source Business Model
While offering software for free might seem like nonsense at first sight, it turns
out to be a smart triple-win strategy.
Versant uses the now-established, open source dual license business model as
pioneered by MySQL, one of the world's most popular relational databases. In this
model, products are made available in their entirety under the GPL and also under
a commercial license. Any developer wishing to use the software in an open source
product that falls under the GPL can use the free open source version. Those developers
wishing to embed db4o into a for-profit product can choose the commercial
runtime license. Other uses and licenses including those for evaluation, development,
and academic application remain free under the GPL, creating a large and lively
community around the product at very low cost to the vendor.
Note that the GPL version 2 license is the "cleanest" open source license, because it clearly
states a "quid-pro-quo": if the providing vendor is open source, then users need
to be open source as well. The dual license model extends this by offering a
commercial license for those who wish to use the technology commercially. This alternative
removes the limitations of the GPL license obligations for commercial developers,
therefore making the product available to a much larger audience. It also allows
Versant to meet commercial users' needs with indemnification, a single point
of contact for fast-response support, and directed product development. That is,
as opposed to "pure" open source software that floats freely among the community
and is altered at random, db4o's core product development is guided by the company,
with an eye toward filtering community input and implementing the best recommendations.
Also, the company sets the agenda and establishes a road map, so that developers
can predict where the technology is going for better planning and decision-making.
The vast community and extended use of an open source product platform like db4o
is the key to its success. All users, commercial or not, benefit from its wide adoption:
better-tested software, better suggestions (with users actually looking into the
code), better peer exchange of experiences - positive and negative - eliminates
the gatekeeping function and also the enormous overhead associated with Outbound
Sales and Marketing departments. These functions are actually the biggest cost factors
in most closed-source software companies today. Customers end up sharing the burden
of paying for sales efforts aimed at explaining to them why they should purchase
a product that they weren't looking for in the first place. But in the open source
world, this sort of outbound proselytizing adds no value. Open source companies
like db4o (can afford to) wait for customers to come to them, in search of an appropriate
product and hence realize enormous savings in sales and marketing efforts.
Versant also has a huge cost advantage when it comes to production. Using open
source development processes and tools, db4o can productively employ a distributed
workforce, blending internal and external personnel to hire the best person for
the right job regardless of location. Utilizing open and free collaboration platforms
such as newsgroups, CVS, Bugzilla, and Skype, to name just a few, Versant can
foster a productive dialogue between users and core developers. This not only advances
its transparent development model, but also eliminates the bulk of high software
production costs.
With these various savings, Versant's model allows it to incur much lower cost
of doing business, and can therefore sustainably offer its customers more competitive
prices and higher quality than closed-source competitors can. While our customers
will not be "pampered" by sales personnel, they will enjoy the huge benefits of
an innovative, stable, and well-supported product platform that makes
their life easier and eliminates a number of major headaches in their software development
processes.
Our interactive and completely transparent development model makes product evaluation
much more efficient, as deficiencies are evident and openly discussed. This drives
Versant to invest in product improvements rather than in sales collateral. Effectively,
most commercial customers start off as members of the open source user community,
as they usually begin by evaluating the product for free before they are ready to
purchase. The resulting co-existence of community, commercial customers, and vendor
translates into a win-win-win situation: It is not until customers are ready to
ship complete products that Versant asks for a fair and proportional reimbursement
for the materialized benefits of the enabling technology.
Paradoxically, it is the paying, commercial customers who benefit most. The open
source community offers them efficient, free evaluation in the decision-making stage,
and its low-cost production and distribution mechanisms provide them excellent quality
software at much lower prices in the long run.
Driving a Platform
"Especially on the client side, such as in stand-alone devices and
other zero-administration environments, engineers look for innovative persistence
solutions that meet their immediate specifications and help them outrun the competition.
As a result, more than 50% of embedded and device software developers still build
their own database tools today. With the advent of standardized object-oriented
platforms, such as embedded Java and the .NET CompactFramework, we expect object
databases to become a universal solution for OO persistence - with db4o's open source
offering leading the charge."
--Chris Lanfear, Director, VDC
Versant aims to take the open source business model a level beyond what classical
open source players like Linux and MySQL have done by effectively introducing an
innovative product platform by means of the open source community's pervasiveness.
That is, we are working to advance object database technology not to commoditize
a common, mainstream software category, but rather to drive the creation of a new,
viable platform that will foster multiple product families and expansion into new
markets.
For platform products like databases, the key to business success is a minimum installed
base that makes a product acceptable to commercial developers. Versant has successfully
embraced a model that drives fast user adoption at very low cost, while still reliably '
collecting revenues from the subset of (commercial) users deriving the most commercial
benefit from db4o.
No other open source object database experienced similar growth to that of db4o following its
product launch in 2004, when more than 60,000 developers registered in only 48
months and 2,000,000 downloads and many more deployments materialized within a very
short timeframe. At the same time, Versant has successfully closed commercial deals with
the likes of
BMW,
Boeing, Bosch, Hertz,
Ricoh, and
Seagate
.
As noted, db4o is now world's most popular object database - setting
the stage to quickly become a winning platform across markets.
Native OO Advantages
"Ask any object oriented developer about their list of frustrations
and you're likely to hear them mention the difficulty transitioning from object-oriented
thinking to relational persistence. Versant aims to eliminate this divide entirely,
without the overhead of an object/relational mapping layer, by providing native
object oriented persistence, thereby allowing developers to store data in the same
manner as the application generating it: as an object."
--Stephen O'Grady, Senior Analyst, RedMonk
Object orientation is not just a technology but a methodology for structuring and
representing data in a more "naturalistic" way than the methods used in early architectures,
i.e. hierarchical and relational models. The industry has recognized the value of
this methodology, and moved to make OO the mainstream programming paradigm, with
Java (pushed by IBM via Eclipse) and .NET (Microsoft) technologies competing head-to-head
for the lead. db4o not only runs under both platforms, but has also proven strong
and efficient in cross-platform deployment. As a consequence, companies can choose
heterogeneous platforms to increase their competitiveness and mitigate vendor lock-in.
A typical example of this advantage is a heterogeneous architecture with clients
like PDAs running on Windows Mobile (.NET), while the server-side runs on Java and
open-source components. Another example is an ISV's product to run on both Java
and .NET-enabled devices like smart phones and game consoles or on a desktop computer.
There are many advantages of using "native" object technology over ORDBMS or RDBMS
paired with an OR mapper, and these technological advantages significantly impact
an organization's competitiveness and bottom line. Think of such advantages as a
40% improvement in battery life of a mobile device by avoiding the overhead of
object-relational mapping compute resources.
First, we have mentioned that object databases not only simplify development by
eliminating the time and resource-consumptive OR-mismatch entirely, but they also
foster more sophisticated development through gains in flexibility and productivity
brought on by "true" object-orientation.
db4o's ground-breaking object-oriented replication technology solves problems arising
from distributed data architectures. Partially connected devices need to efficiently
replicate data with peers or servers. The challenge lies in the creation of "smart"
conflict resolution algorithms, when redundant data sets are simultaneously modified
and need to be merged. With db4o's OO approach, developers can build smarter and
easier synchronization conflict resolution and embed the necessary business logic
into the data layer, rather than into the middle-tier or application layer. This
creates "smart" objects that can be stored in a distributed fashion, but easily
consolidated, as the smart object itself knows how to resolve synchronization conflicts.
As a result, developers can now more consistently persist data on distributed, partially
connected clients than ever before, while decreasing bandwidth requirements and
increasing the responsiveness and reach of their mobile solutions or smart devices
to make products more competitive in the marketplace.
Second, with an object database, the object scheme is one and the same as the data
model. Developers can more easily update their models to meet changing requirements,
or for debugging and refactoring. db4o lets developers work with object structures
almost as if they were "in-memory"' structures. Little additional coding is required
to manage object persistence. As a result, companies can add new features to their
products faster to stay ahead of the competition.
Third, developers can now use object-oriented and entirely native approaches when
it comes to querying, since db4o was the first in the industry to provide Native
Queries (NQ) with its Version 5.0 launched in November 2005. Native Queries provide
an API to use the programming language (Java/.NET) itself to access the database.
Unlike incumbent, string-based, non-native APIs (such as SQL, OQL, JDOQL and others)
Native Queries are 100% type-safe, 100% refactorable and 100% object-oriented, boosting
developer productivity by up to 30%.
Fourth, db4o also allows for more complex object models than its relational or non-native
counterparts; as the persistence requirements become more complex, db4o's unique
design easily handles (or absorbs) the added complexity, so developers can continue
to work as though new complexity were never introduced. Complexity means not only
taller object trees and extensive use of inheritance, but also dynamically evolving
object models, most extremely if development is taking place under runtime conditions
(which makes db4o a leading choice for biotech simulation software, for instance).
db4o could be referred to as "agnostic to complexity," because no type or amount
of complexity will change its behavior or restrain its capabilities, as is the case
with RDBMS or non-native technology. The real world is more complex than IT architects
wish. With db4o breaking through this complexity, developers are able to write more
naturalistic - i.e., user friendly and business-case appropriate - software components
without incurring such high costs that such an undertaking becomes unfeasible.
In sum, db4o's native, cross-platform OO architecture enables its users to build
more competitive products with faster update cycles, more naturalistic object models
to match more realistic use cases, and more distributed data architectures to increase
the reach of products. Native OO database technology is clearly more flexible and
powerful than software that stems from the world of functional programming languages.
Future Prospects
The db4o product is a part of Versant Corporation's product portofilo.
Versant is a public company on NASDAQ:VSNT. The headquarters is located at 255
Shoreline Dr. Redwood City, CA 94065
db4o was created in 2000 by Chief Architect
Carl Rosenberger, and first shipped in 2001. Some 100 commercial pilot customers
and a loyal user community have endorsed db4o from its earliest days, and proved
it ready for mission-critical applications prior to its commercial launch in 2004.
Since then, hundreds of prestigious new customers helped realize upwards of 2,000,000
downloads and many more deployments, and built a fast-growing, devoted community
of more than 60,000 registered users.
With the open source code effectively being escrowed to the public, db4o has the
world's best insurance that it will continue to thrive as a powerful, living platform
in 10, 20, or more years from now. Thus, OOP developers can rest assured that they
can safely choose db4o for projects with a long-term outlook.
All OO developers stand to benefit, along with the developer community at large,
not to mention the many industries to which object database technology brings revolutionary
capabilities - in mobile solutions, in bio-medical, in automotive, in real-time
control and industrial automation, and in many other systems.
Versant has become a high-profile forerunner in the open source wave that is
changing the software industry unlike few paradigm changes before. Embraced by players
like IBM, HP, and SAP, open source has become a major "game changer," creating a
new ecosystem in which object database technology has finally found its rightful
place as a viable database choice that makes the life of Java and .NET developers
so much easier - and thus saves huge amounts of development time and cost.
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