With a recent report on the database market saying the number of new applications and specialty databases will grow in the broadening market, object database vendors are touting deals for their products.
In a recent report, the Boston-based Aberdeen Group predicted that the database market will top $10 billion by 2003 and that specialized databases and Microsofts SQL Server, by supporting high-end applications, will help expand the market for database systems.
With the market for databases growing, two object database companies last week announced new deals for their technology.
eXcelon Corp., of Burlington, Mass., announced a deal with Ordnance Survey, Great Britains national mapping agency, where eXcelons ObjectStore object database serves as the core platform for Ordnance Surveys Geospatial Object Server (GOS). Ken Rugg, eXcelons chief technology officer, said that GOS is the object-oriented repository for Ordnance Surveys OS MasterMap. The OS MasterMap is a repository of geospatial data, which features at least 400 million details on the British landscape, the company said.
“Basically, the technology were providing is an object-oriented database to help them model their data in the form theyre using it,” Rugg said. “Our technology provides a database and caching architecture that lets them model and store information in a very different way.”
Rugg said the GOS delivers map data in Geographic Markup Language (GML) format in response to user requests.
OS MasterMap features a Web-based service for selection and delivery, and provides users access to various views of data in the dataset.
eXcelons ObjectStore is used in telecommunications and financial services applications, among others, Rugg said.
“The power of ObjectStore is being able to model any structure you have and still have full database concurrency, consistency and control,” he said.
eXcelon also markets an XML database known as the eXtensible Information Server; Javlin, a Java 2 Enterprise Edition data cache manager, as well as ObjectStore.
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Meanwhile, Objectivity Inc., of Mountain View, Calif., announced that Silicon Graphics Inc., also of Mountain View, has chosen Objectivitys Objectivity/DB as the platform for SGIs ASIC/DB semiconductor design system.
The ASIC/DB serves as a platform for collaborative development for SGI engineers, the company said.
SGI engineers at the companys Design Automation Department in Chippewa Falls, Wis., developed the ASIC/DB as a tool to assist in the development of SGI workstations and servers.
And because the SGI developers in Wisconsin have to work with designers at SGI facilities in California, Minnesota and New Jersey, ASIC/DBs ability to allow users to work concurrently and collaboratively was a plus, the company said.
“Because we needed to serve geographically dispersed design teams, Objectivity seemed like the natural fit for ASIC/DB, since we knew from experience that it was by design a high-performance, distributed object database,” said Joel Trevino, computer-aided design manager for SGI, in a statement.
Leon Guzenda, chief technology officer at Objectivity said: “Versant [Corp., Fremont, Calif.] and eXcelon used to be direct competitors when we were all simply trying to address the generic market for object databases, which was largely technical and scientific. Nowadays eXcelon is focused on the market for XML databases, generally attached to an intranet or the Internet.” While “Versant has focused more on B2B and seems to be earning most of its revenue from [IBM] WebSphere consultancy,” he said.
“Objectivity is strongly focused on providing a highly scalable solution to equipment and software vendors and on the Very Large Database market, where we are pretty much out on our own,” Guzenda said.
In other database news, Austin Sierra Technologies Inc., of Seattle, announced Query Studio 1.1, a visual SQL builder that generates SQL code for Microsoft Visual Studio .Net.
Also, Seattle-based MySQL Inc., the maker of a popular open-source database, announced that its latest quarter, ended September 30, 2002, was its most profitable yet. Company officials said revenues for the quarter were seven times those for the same period last year.
