Progress Tunes ObjectStore for Enterprise

Progress Software Corp. is giving its ObjectStore embeddable database enhancements in speed, reliability and flexibility.

The Bedford, Mass., developer this week will release ObjectStore 6.1, the first upgrade of the object-oriented database since Progress acquired it in its October purchase of Excelon Corp.

ObjectStore 6.1 has more enterprise features, including increased availability and clustering and replication support, to improve operational effectiveness.

The merging of the two companies technologies unites Progress simple interface and ease of use with ObjectStores more complex approach to data handling. In an ObjectStore world, integration between an application and the database is more seamless than with relational databases, where applications must map to records and fields, Progress officials said. ObjectStore uses a flexible data modeling paradigm that allows users to create an application virtually any way they want, rather than being mapped to a schema that sets data-specific fields and records, they said.

This simplicity obscures the fact that ObjectStore handles vastly complex data structures that dont lend themselves to being broken down into fields, such as CAD drawings.

Analysts say ObjectStore 6.1 may be one harbinger of vendors move to bring the strengths of object-oriented databases—the capability to handle intensively complex data thats rapidly processed—to sectors outside the technologys traditional homes in telecommunications, bioinformatics and the like.

“Most people dont look to [object-oriented databases] as enterprise databases,” said Carl Olofson, an analyst at International Data Corp., in Framingham, Mass. “It may be that Progress brings it to a whole new group of customers.”