Embedded database vendor McObject is making a play to appeal to Java developers with the creation of a new interface for its ExtremeDB product.
With its JNI (Java Native Interface) for ExtremeDB, announced Jan. 18, McObject is looking to deliver an in-memory database for the Java community capable of running at the speed of compiled C/C++.
“We see this as being a great solution for embedded Java, but probably more importantly for what we’ve been calling the real-time enterprise-enterprise applications that have very high-performance requirements,” McObject CEO Steven Graves told eWEEK.
The idea, he said, is to exploit Java’s reflection capability to build up the database dictionary.
“Our database dictionary in turn is what the database run-time uses to know how big an object is, what fields belong to what object … and other things like that so we know how to lay things out in the database,” Graves explained. “We use reflection to build the dictionary and then the dictionary helps the run-time know how to manage the data.”
The big advantage to all this is the Java developer gets to stay in the Java environment, he added.
“They don’t have to go out and use some separate database definition language or scheme language to create a schema and somehow map that back into Java,” he said. “The developer’s just defining plain old Java objects, [and] again we then use Java’s reflection to programmatically translate that into a database dictionary … so that eliminates that extra step of having to compile the database schema.”
The reflection mechanism is also used to generate a separate schema language that can be used by C and C++ programmers to create a database from the same structure the Java database is using so they can therefore work with the same database, he added.
In real-time enterprise environments that require performance that McObject argues cannot be obtained through standard relational database technologies, the JNI offers the “rapid in-memory data access provided by NoSQL distributed object caches … but with persistence” and other database features, said McObject Director of Marketing Ted Kenney.
“One of the characteristics of these [NoSQL] solutions … is they relax a lot of the rules that surround traditional database management systems, and we find developers don’t necessarily like to give that up,” Kenney said. “Using ExtremeDB you get safeguarded data integrity through ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability)-compliant transactions and other ‘real’ database features like indexes and SQL if you want to use that.”
The JNI works with the Standard, Fusion, 64-bit and High Availability editions of ExtremeDB, and is available from McObject now by request. By the end of January, the company plans to have it incorporated with all the software editions mentioned above and include it in the evaluation versions (Standard and Fusion) offered for free on the McObject Website, Kenney said.