NDataStore #Delphi #borcon2004

I had a lot of questions, and they answered most of them right away:

• Transactions? Yes, full transaction support including rollback and disaster recovery
• Client/server? Yes (but also supports local in-process)
• SQL? Yes (SQL-92)

Here's the rest of my notes:

• Short answer: Yes, this is a real database.
• ADO.NET and BDP drivers
• SQL-92 entry-level compliance
• When running locally, can run in-process (remote is TCP/IP)
• Transaction support
  • Log-based, crash recovery, rollback
  • Row-level locking (plus table locking if you want it)
  • Support for read-only transactions
  • High-availability support (automatic and manual failover, incremental backup)
  • Disaster recovery
• Stored procs, user-defined functions, triggers are coded in .NET
  • Direct access to transactional context (you're running in-process on the server)
• Managed code protects the database kernel
• Single DB kernel for multiple editions
  • A lot of vendors prefer to have a "server kernel" and a "micro-kernel" that aren't quite compatible in one way or another
  • NDataStore doesn't; local, server, and high-reliability server all have the same disk structure, identical protocol, same transactiton management, same SQL, etc.
• All this in a single, 1.1 MB DLL
  • That's for ADO.NET. If you want BDP, there are additional DLLs.
• If you want to do client/server, there's a client assembly available that's even smaller.
• Performance: Managed code doesn't make it slower.
  • 64-bit support
• Licensing: Same as JDataStore ($60/seat for desktop version; $500/server for normal server; $1000/server for high-reliability server)
• Faster than mySQL in most benchmarks
  • Note that mySQL does not support disaster recovery (doesn't force writes to flush to disk immediately, so a commit isn't really a commit), and NDataStore is still faster in several benchmarks
  • Obviously, these are vendor benchmarks, so salt grains are required
• Single-file data store
• Zero-admin database: keeps transaction logs only as long as needed (no need to truncate or anything messy like that)
• Next steps:
  • Apply for NDataStore field test (drop off a business card, or e-mail ggoldfield at borland dot com)
  • Will need to sign an NDA, so you may not see me blogging about it :-(
• Interesting note: They actually maintain a single Java codebase, and run a tool to translate into C# with every build!
  • 95% of code is shared
  • Other 5% is .NET platform support (like ADO.NET), and written in C#
• No Delphi/Win32 client yet, but they've broken ground on this and are evaluating it

Sigh. If only they'd had this on the market a month ago. The folks back home (especially John and Jeff) will know what I mean.