Objectivity, Inc., a provider of the object and graph databases, has announced the availability of a new version of its flagship product, Objectivity/DB. Version 11.0 adds new enhancements for deployment, querying, and object clustering for improved big data analysis. Objectivity/DB is deployed in multiple verticals with customers including the U.S. Department of Defense, Ericsson, Siemens and X.
“There are really two sets of new features,” Leon Guzenda, founder of Objectivity, tells 5 Minute Briefing. One is more about tools and the placement of objects, and the other is heavily query-oriented.
Tools for Ease of Use
In the area of new tools, says Guzenda, Objectivity has created a new managed object-placement system which, he says, “is really just an XML file. The rules are read from any XML file when any application starts up and it sets the defaults for where things go.” This allows users to make sure that images always go into an image file or go into a particular subset of a database so they can be found very easily. Describing this as a minor change, Guzenda says nonetheless that it will make things easier for users.
“In addition, in order to accommodate older programs you can describe the placement for existing databases,” says Guzenda. “What typically happens is that people run an application for a year or so and then they find out things about the usage and decide it might have been better to put all the documents over on a particular machine - they can do that - but they don’t have to move all the old ones over if they don’t want to yet. We will find the old ones but we will also start creating new ones in the place that you have set.”
In addition, there is a new command-line mechanism for running Release 11.0 Objectivity/DB administrative tools as well, and there is a unified interface so that all the tools look the same and have a GUI to run them. “You can also call all of the tools from APIs because Objectivity is most often embedded inside systems or applications that run in closed environments,” explains Guzenda. Additionally, the product now enables faster and easier installation. “It is considerably easier to get started now.”
Beefed Up Query Capabilities
However, according to Guzenda, “The major effort and new features are around the query area.” With the new release, Objectivity has “beefed up what we call the Predicate Query Language (PQL). It has got more operators now and it is more in line with what you would find in LINQ (Language-Integrated Query), Microsoft’s language, which we also support.”
In addition, he says, “There was also a large change to the way the query engine itself works which enables people to support their own query languages if they like. This is going to make it a lot easier both for us to support new query languages and also for our users to support some of the intricate specialized query languages that they use. That is particularly true in manufacturing and in the intelligence community.”
And finally, there is also a new navigation query capability (Objectivity/C++) that supports navigation of persistent objects on a graph. “We have made it possible to just start somewhere and go anywhere,” says Guzenda. Supplementing that capability, he adds, “We have modified the internal parallel query engine so that it can explore graphs in parallel as well. It will explore a distributed graph spread across multiple machines perhaps in different countries, and then it will stitch up the results at the end of each individual query and present a uniform result to the application that is running above it.”
In total, says Guzenda, the new release addresses the needs of a broader set of Ojectivity/DB users and their changing requirements. In the past decade, says Guzenda, Objectivity has had more and more users from the traditional IT world and especially from the intelligence community and what they do is very query-intensive. “Objectivity/DB 11.0 is really in response to our customers requiring more and more powerful query capabilities.”
Visit Objectivity for more information.