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K U D O O F T H E M O N T H
"After experimenting with db4o I realized that object oriented databases have really the potential to boost up productivity by relieving the programmer of the burden of having to convert all the data between the relational and the object oriented world."
--Martin Unterholzner
A R T I C L E S
-- EVENT SERIES: MEET db4o AT A LOCATION NEAR YOU --
db4objects and the db4o community have launched a number of different events which will bring db4o live into many corners of the world and surely to a location near you. A complete list and details are accessible on db4o's expanded event site.
The first set of events highlights Ted Neward's talk "Essential db4o" which helps developers to understand when and how to use db4o's native object persistence solution. Ted ("The Vietnam of Computer Science") will be speaking at the "No Fluff Just Stuff" symposiums in 6 locations throughout the US and Canada. In addition, db4objects is hosting a free session at its head offices in San Mateo, CA, on October 25 from 2-3:30pm. Seats are limited -- so make your reservation now at sales@db4o.com.
Community driven events make up a big part of the series, including dedicated db4o User Group (dUG) meetings in China, Japan, and South America. In addition, db4o will participate in community events and conferences including the Mono Meeting (Boston), the New York JUG, the SD Forum (Palo Alto, California), OOPSLA (Portland, Oregon), FOSS.IN (Bangalore), and the OSDBC (Frankfurt).
db4o 2007 Roadshow Around the Globe
The db4o 2007 Roadshow runs from November 2006 through February 2007 and will stop in Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Munich, Paris, Berlin, London, San Francisco, Boston, Sydney, Singapore, Mumbai, and Johannesburg. Visit the 2007 Roadshow event page to find more details and reserve your free seat now!
-- db4o REPLICATION SYSTEM dRS v1.2 AVAILABLE --
A new development version of the db4o Replication System (dRS) is available for free download from the db4o Download Center.
dRS Version 1.2 now includes both, a .NET and a Java version, and thus makes the benefits of this powerful replication tool available to all db4o users in their native language (the .NET version currently synchronizes between db4o instances only). In addition, v1.2 supports user defined callbacks so you can control when to stop replication, resolve conflicts, or perform some other operations during a replication session. Also, you can now replicate deletions of objects between databases to keep everything fully synchronized. Further compatibility improvements were made for dRS to work ever more seamless with MySQL, Postgresql and Oracle.
-- OBJECTMANAGER v2.0 RELEASED --
ObjectManager is a Graphical User Interface that allows you to easily see what's inside your database and to query and manipulate your data. Version 2.0 is now available as a development version from the db4o Download Center.
- Powerful ad-hoc queries
- Efficient handling of large data sets
- Table view for quick scrolling through large data sets
- Tree view for drilling down through an object graph
- Access to internal database information including stored classes, data size and indexes
- Management functions including Backup and Defragment
ObjectManager 2.0 a Rewrite in Response to User Survey 2006
In the db4o 2006 User Survey we found that users need a much improved UI, when they voted the improved ObjectManager including database inspection functionality to the top of their list of priorities. In response, db4objects has sponsored Version 2, which is a total rewrite over its v1.x predecessor.
In addition to last month's preview release, this version is now fully available for .NET and Java and includes, apart from a host of bug fixes and a cleaner UI, the ability to edit fields in tree view.
-- NEW CUSTOMERS: RICOH --
Ricoh Company, Ltd., the leading maker of digital office solutions with annual sales over $17 billion, forged a partnership with db4objects to develop Ricoh's future product development platform, which includes db4o.
Ito, the software team leader at Ricoh in Tokyo, Japan, explains: "db4o provides a persistence solution for our broad range of technical challenges and for our stringent quality standards. 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."
-- db4o EXCELS IN INDEPENDENT OO7 PERFORMANCE BENCHMARK --
Another independent benchmark has confirmed db4o's superior performance for object persistence compared to object-relational mappers like Hibernate, when db4o ran up to 55x faster in queries for complex objects. In fact, out of the predefined test runs, db4o offered significantly better performance than Hibernate/PostgreSQL in 19 of 20 test cases. The new benchmark confirmed the findings of the 2005 open source benchmark Pole Position on Sourceforge which measures db4o performance up to 44x faster than Hibernate.
The ESPRESSO research group at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, has ported the legacy OO7 benchmark from C++ to Java. The OO7 benchmark is the single most recognizable object-oriented performance benchmark available and was introduced by a team led by M.J. Carey in 1993 to measure the performance of complex object persistence operations. The researchers benchmarked db4o, the world's most popular object database, against Hibernate, the leading object-relational mapper from Jboss/RedHat. Both technologies are open source and available in Java and .NET.
"db4o's overall performance was better than that of Hibernate"
"It was found that db4o's overall performance was better than that of Hibernate," the researchers concluded. "Many of the test results seem to confirm our rules of thumb (here, that the overhead of object-relational translation causes ORM-based implementations to be consistently slower than staying in object form with an object database)." Specifically, "the general picture is that db4o queries are fast and that Hibernate is competitive only in isolated cases, where perhaps the performance of the relational database part more than compensates for the object-relational overhead."
The full research results are documented in a paper, which is available on ODBMS.ORG, the research portal for education and research on object databases.
-- db4objects PARTNERS WITH SUN MICROSYSTEMS --
Sun Microsystems and db4objects have entered a partnership to jointly promote Java technology and db4o not only for desktops and servers, but also for today's demanding Embedded and Real-Time environments. As such, db4objects has become a Member of the Sun PartnerAdvantage Program. The partnership includes coordinated key account and marketing activities as well as technology collaboration.
Sun co-founder Vinod Khosla is one of the investors in db4objects, Inc.
L O O K I N G I N T O T H E M I R R O R
Press coverage about db4o since the last newsletter:
"Open source globalization benefits organizations, individuals"
IT Manager's Journal, October 16, 2006, by Christof Wittig
"db4o 5.7 Accelerates Queries with B-trees Index"
CSDN.net, September 26, 2006 (In Chinese)
"Barbarians at the Gate"
Enterprise Open Source Magazine, September 22, 2006, by Andrew Cowie
"The Microsoft LINQ Project"
dot.net Magazin, September 2006, by Stefan Edlich (In German)
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With best regards
The db4objects team.
www.db4o.com
newsletter@db4o.com
Phone +1 (650) 577-2340
1900 S Norfolk Street, Suite 350
San Mateo, CA 94403 (USA)