Steven Graves' Blog

In-memory database systems  (IMDSs) offer breakthrough performance by eliminating I/O, caching, data transfer, and other overhead that is hard-wired into traditional "on-disk" database management systems (DBMSs). But some applications require a high level of data durability. In other words, what happens to the data if somebody pulls the plug? As a so...

Most people justifiably take technology vendors’ claims of blazing speed with a grain of salt. As a result, industries that live and die by IT performance have developed independent, audited benchmarks to enable “apples to apples” comparisons between competing solutions. For capital markets technology – that is, for systems like al...

Vicki Chan ,  U.S. reporter for Inside Market Data , recently broke the news  that McObject is readying a database monitor for eXtremeDB, along with additional information about upcoming changes/improvements to eXtremeDB that we hope to roll out this quarter. The database monitor will be an extension to database browser that is currently shipped in the ./...

As an in-memory database system (IMDS) pioneer, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that McObject protects its turf. Early on, we published a whitepaper to highlight the significant differences between an in-memory database versus a database that happens to be in memory (a la deployed on a RAM-disk). Due primarily to (1) the efforts of McObject (over 100 article...

A couple of months ago, I began a two-part series on the misconception that in-house or open source software are lower-cost alternatives to commercial software. In the first part, I addressed in-house/roll-your-own development.  In this post, I’ll discuss open source.  And, repeating my opening comments from the first post, this is not going to be a rant...

First of all, this is not going to be a rant about/against open source software.  McObject offers open source software in our Perst object-oriented embedded database system for Java and .NET.Rather, this is going to be a two-part post on the misconception that in-house (AKA homegrown, AKA roll-your-own) or open source software are lower cost alternatives...

Last week, McObject exhibited at the Seattle (August 24) and Vancouver B.C. (August 26) Real-Time & Embedded Computing Conferences (RTECCs).  If you’re not familiar with these events, visit their website, where the About Us page says “This single-day event series is specially designed for people developing computer systems and time critical applicatio...

There has been some interesting recent news in our world of databases.This morning, I picked up my August 15 issue of SD Times. In the lower right corner is a blurb about the 1.0 release of CouchDB, with the full article dominating page 3.  Congratulations to the CouchDB team.  In a press release about CouchDB 1.0 that I read earlier in the week, I was su...

The term 'embedded database' has been around since the mid-1980's. It was originally created to mean a database system that is embedded within application code. In other words, the database management system is delivered as a library that you, the developer, link with your application code (and other libraries) to create an executable. In that...

Some of us here at McObject just read this article on embedded.com titled Making the case for commercial communication integration middleware.A lot of the suppositions in that article with respect to the case for COTS operating systems and communications middleware also ring true for database systems.  From the beginning of McObject, we've recognized...