jBASE International, a leading supplier of database management software, has unveiled features of the upcoming version of its multidimensional database, jBASE Release 5. The new release builds on jBASE Release 4 to deliver a true 64-bit database implementation together with new application programming interfaces (APIs) and enhanced resilience through the introduction of Dataguard.
Additionally in this release, warmstart recovery enables jBASE 5 to automatically recover from events such as power failures in a similar way to mainstream RDBMS products. This is made possible by the Checkpointing enhancements to Transaction Journaling.
With the introduction of Checkpointing, Release 5 offers enhanced Transaction Journaling to provide and greater flexibility and robustness. Periodically, Checkpointing pauses activity to record a point in time when the database is in a known state-a checkpoint.
The new release introduces resilient files. According to jBASE, in badly sized hash files data is frequently split across different frames and all must be read from and written to disk when the data changes. If something goes wrong there is a significant chance that an update will be interrupted and the structure of the file corrupted. In jBASE Release 5, a new JR resilient file type has been introduced to eliminate this possibility. In a resilient file, where data spans across disk frames, it is built up in a separate area of the file and flushed to disk. Only once it is on disk is a pointer updated to the new data structure rather than the old structure. There is a small performance overhead when using JR files due to the extra flushing. As well as being resilient, JR files also resize automatically. Additionally, Backup and Restore commands have been enhanced so that a database backup and restore can be performed without the need to shutdown activity on the database server.
A new jRemote Resource Adapter has also been implemented for jBASE 5. It is a J2EE Connector Architecture (JCA)-compliant resource adapter allowing J2EE applications to integrate with a jBASE Enterprise Information System. The JCA accepts connections with JEE clients and manages the lookup, execution and transactional flow of Enterprise Java Beans (EJB), JMS queues and requests from Message Driven Beans (MDB). By means of the JEE user functions a jBASIC program can perform transactional calls to EJBs, drop messages on JMS message queues and perform processing via custom synchronous MDBs.
Additional enhancements include a new Secure Socket Layer (SSL) API; enhancements to the query processor to accept SQL commands as well as jQL commands; and a new 64-bit JDBC connector, which allows external applications written in Java to retrieve data from jBASE via this industry standard interface. Additionally, a 64-bit ODBC Connector implementing the OpenDatabase Connectivity (ODBC) 3.0 API has also been developed. It supports a driver manager-based and Unicode-compliant interface featuring support for transactions and the calling of stored procedures.
The jBASE Release 5 Beta program will begin in autumn 2009. For information on testing applications against Release 5, email r5@jbase.com for more information. Visit the jBASE website for more information.