April 23, 2013 - McObject released eXtremeDB 5.0, the latest upgrade of its embedded database system, with new features that make eXtremeDB’s clustering faster and more flexible, and further simplify its administration. Additional improvements in version 5.0 accelerate performance across the eXtremeDB product family – including in its high availability, in-memory database system (IMDS), 64-bit and other editions – and provide new tools to make application development faster and easier.
New features in eXtremeDB Cluster 5.0 include:
- A local tables option that exempts specified eXtremeDB Cluster tables from cluster-wide replication, to accelerate processing at the local node.
- Dynamic clustering, which enables nodes to join and leave clusters without interrupting processing.
- Support for Infiniband switched fabric interconnect.
- Support for the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard, which increases messaging efficiency for parallel processing on distributed-memory systems (i.e. clusters) to deliver higher speed and scalability.
Local tables are shareable, when desired, through a scatter/gather mechanism
This further simplifies administration for a clustering database technology that counts minimal run-time maintenance as a defining characteristic
Infiniband reduces communication latency between eXtremeDB Cluster nodes and improve throughput and scalability
Open and widely-used, MPI provides the additional benefits of developer familiarity and more portable code
In McObject’s tests, eXtremeDB Cluster using Infiniband and MPI performed more than 7.5x faster than the same system implemented with “plain vanilla” gigabit networking (TCP/IP and Ethernet). MPI can also be used over Ethernet-TCP, and in McObject’s tests this combination performed almost 1.5x faster than using TCP/IP over Ethernet. eXtremeDB Cluster’s Infiniband and MPI support is provided on Linux in the current release.
Other features in version 5.0 reduce DBMS latency, and improve developer efficiency, in all eXtremeDB editions. Newly supported NUMERIC and DECIMAL data types provide more precise calculations than alternative FLOAT and DOUBLE types.
By permitting integer operations, NUMERIC and DECIMAL data types enable faster performance while also allowing the database designer to specify the exact scale and precision required. eXtremeDB 5.0 also adds support for nullable data types, or the ability to set data types to the special value NULL.
This provides greater flexibility in representing missing or inapplicable information in query results. eXtremeDB’s NULL value support extends to both its SQL and native C/C++, Java and .NET application programming interfaces (APIs).
For the growing community of developers using eXtremeDB with the Java and .NET languages, version 5.0 adds features that increase flexibility, programming efficiency and performance. These include:
- .NET and Java class generators. eXtremeDB’s database schema compiler, mcocomp, can now process database definition language (DDL) files (database schemas) written in the DBMS’s native language, and output code defining the equivalent .java and .cs classes.
- Confirmed interoperability with JamaicaVM, a hard real-time Java run-time environment provided by aicas GmbH.
- Compatibility of eXtremeDB’s Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) API with JDK 7
This is a boon when adding Java or .NET front-ends to existing eXtremeDB databases that are defined in the native DDL
JamaicaVM offers fully deterministic garbage collection and is optimized for critical systems such as controls and visualization
Version 5.0 also improves eXtremeDB High Availability, McObject’s DBMS edition that implements master-replica database replication and serves as the basis of many fault-tolerant systems. eXtremeDB 5.0 adds High Availability functions that improve an application’s ability to control failover to a replica, by providing greater control to the replica over closing the communication channel to the master.