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Altana Pharma Speeds Up its Research Pipeline with db4o

SAN MATEO, Calif., Feb. 15, 2006 - db4objects, creators of the leading open source object database for Java and .NET, today announced that Altana Pharma, a global-40 pharmaceutical company with sales of US$ 2.5 billion, speeds up its R&D pipeline of new drugs by using db4o to store complex scientific object models natively in its "Chemistry Information System" while running the db4o Replication System (dRS) to remain fully data compatible with the company's existing Oracle relational database.

Altana Pharma AG, headquartered in Konstanz, Germany, has a globally distributed workforce which develops new drugs such as the blockbuster Pantoprazole, an innovative proton-pump inhibitor (PPI). In order to speed up time-to-market and boost efficiency in an ever more competitive marketplace, the innovative company thrives to do more research based on IT rather than in labs. As a result, Altana Pharma invested heavily into support systems for their scientists. However, they found that conventional, relational databases were not able to store the data model driven by the complexity of the underlying natural sciences.

Altana now uses db4o to store the complex object model of its "Chemistry Information System" (CIS) running on 500 clients as a first step towards moving more and more scientific persistence tasks into the object-oriented space. This data warehouse application helps to discover chemical structure-effect relationships using a computer. With the deployment of the newly released db4o Replication System (dRS), Altana Pharma ensures full data compatability with backoffice IT systems running Hibernate and Oracle.

"We were experimenting a long time with relational databases, XML serialization, Castor, and with Hibernate to get the job done, but didn't see the results in response time and flexibility we expected for our native Java environment," said Martin Kraus, CIS project lead. "We selected db4o because it meets our needs exactly for native persistence of complex objects. I wish we had discovered db4o 2 years ago, because we would have easily shaved 6 months off our project time."

"We are proud to welcome Altana Pharma into our fast growing community of developers with a natural science background," said Christof Wittig, CEO of db4objects. "No matter whether in bio-informatics, geo-informatics or chemo-informatics -- all users stand to benefit from db4o's ability to store even the most complex, scientific object models with ease, which shortens critical time to market. Also, db4o's adaptability with its automatic schema evaluation lowers maintenance costs over the lifecycle of an application."

"Already, more than 50% of the global-40 pharmaceutical companies have at least one or more registered users with us - within little more than one year. We now see this translating into design-wins and commercial roll-outs such as at Altana Pharma," adds Wittig.

About db4objects, Inc
db4objects, Inc (www.db4o.com) provides db4o, the only native object database for both Java and .NET, available under open source and commercial licenses. With more than 300,000 downloads and many more deployments, db4o is used by some of the world's most innovative companies, including Boeing, BMW, Hertz, Seagate, and Bosch. db4objects is a privately held company based in San Mateo, California, and backed by noted Silicon Valley investors including Mark Leslie, founding CEO of Veritas.

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