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Progress Software Corp., which has been steadily acquiring companies for a few years, is packaging up the technologies in a line of data synchronization products dubbed DataXtend. It plans to introduce the line on Monday.
The product line includes DataXtend RE (Replication Engine), a heterogenous database replication and synchronization product for mobile users and those with unreliable network connections, and DataXtend CE (Cache Engine), an enterprise database caching product for distributed applications.
Vivek Singhal, vice president of technology with Progress Software Corp.s Real-Time Division, said DataXtend RE handles database replication on remote machines that would otherwise have to be deployed with their own databases.
The product takes either all or a subset of information from a central database and replicates it without an application being explicitly aware of it, Singhal said. It enables organizations to start with an application thats designed to work in fully connected mode—one that accesses a database in a central location—and to deploy the database, without recoding, in a remote location.
DataXtend RE is designed to replicate the database intelligently, handling data integrity in the process.
An example of DataXtend RE in use lies in Interactive Taxis wirelessly networked multimedia computers, which are featured in the back of taxis in cities such as Boston and San Francisco. Enabled by a touch-screen, the units allow passengers to read news, watch movie trailers and check out restaurant listings.
Each unit holds a replicated database that synchronizes with a central database whenever a cab is in range and can establish a connection. The mobile PCs can operate without a connection, also, as they store information locally when out of range.
DataXtend CE is software aimed at deploying data caches in application servers that use a database. It employs Continuous Cache Coordination to ensure that changes made to the database by existing applications are pushed to the distributed cache.
The product provides Eclipse-based graphical tools that offer a choice of model-driven or schema-driven development to simplify and accelerate development of enterprise applications that access relational data.
Next Page: How DataXtend CE provides rapid data access.
How DataXtend CE Provides
Rapid Data Access”>
DataXtend CE uses in-memory speed to rapidly access the data, thus accelerating applications in situations that call for very rapid, very frequent changes to database information.
It works in a similar way to Oracles TimesTen in-memory database, taking information from pretty much any underlying database and mapping it from its relational representation to an object-oriented representation.
It then makes that representation available to applications. Versions are available in Java, C++ and C#.
DataXtend CE is focused on the increase in data requirements of enterprise applications that has accompanied the rise of SOA (service-oriented architecture).
To wit: Whereas each of a group of siloed applications generates a relatively low volume of data requests, a few services in an SOA pick up the work of what was formerly an array of siloed functionality. Because of it, those services then have a much greater rate of data to generate.
“When you move to SOA from a silo architecture, youre concentrating services into a few key systems,” Singhal said.
“Those become mission-critical. The rate at which they must respond to [data] requests is much higher than when you had the original, siloed architecture.”
DataXtend CE is aimed at increasing response rates in such instances. It would be applied, for example, in an equity-trading SOA.
A financial institution that Progress declined to name has been using the product for two or three years to handle data requests from a variety of trading applications, where its techniques of caching and data mapping are “essential” to accelerating data to handle transaction requirements, Singhal said.
Both products are available immediately.
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