FairCom c-treeACE Aims To Bridge Both SQL and NoSQL

Cross platform "engineering-level" database player FairCom has released the tenth edition of its c-treeACE product. The firm says that V10 introduces the industry's first relational "multi-record type support" for integration between relational and non-relational database worlds.

The c-treeACE V10 release also features new Java interfaces, additional platform support, and new replication models. The firm is (arguably) going beyond a customary nod to increased performance by specifying some exact gains as follows:

• 30 percent faster transaction throughput
• 60 percent faster SQL performance
• 200 percent better replication throughput
• 26 percent faster read performance

NOTE: FairCom supports major hardware platforms and operating systems ranging from Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X to IBM AIX and Oracle Solaris. New with V10 is formal support for Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) and 10.8 (Mountain Lion), Microsoft Windows 8 and Microsoft Windows Server 2012, and the latest compiler suites such as Microsoft Visual C 2012 (Visual Studio) and Embarcadero XE2 and XE3.

"The database market is growing substantially, yet there are many problems plaguing developers today: large data volumes; requirements to reduce data access time; data access requirements from a myriad of new locations, like mobile devices and the cloud; trickier integration; and decreasing budgets," said Randal Hoff, FairCom's VP of engineering.

"[Software] engineers tell us they really need technology that enables them to work seamlessly within both the relational and non-relational worlds. In the past, they've felt forced to choose one or the other, when, in fact, they realize concrete benefits from both. Our newest c-treeACE gives them the flexibility to enjoy the best of both worlds: high performance data throughput levels that a NoSQL database can provide; and concurrent relational access for ease of data sharing with other parts of the enterprise, including cloud and mobile devices, all at a reasonable price point."

Tailored Configuration Tuning

FairCom positions c-treeACE as a product with a high level of what it likes to call "tailored configuration" with support for a variety of non-relational API’s (e.g., ISAM, .NET, and JTDB) along with industry-standard relational API's (e.g., SQL, JDBC, ODBC, PHP, Python, etc.) within the same application, over the same data.

This new relational multi-record type support is intended to allow the mapping of non-relational, proprietary data records into relational formats — opening these file formats to industry-standard SQL without the need to change existing data. This allows for the mapping of non-relational data into relational models "on-the-fly," while preserving the existing code. By FairCom's estimation, this functionality will improve performance while minimizing the risk of a full-blown data migration.

Other features here include new Java-based GUI administration tools and a new record-oriented Java interface designed to provide native Java implementation on top of an ISAM API (which, the company says, has shown 30-40 percent performance gains over typical functionality) that has been coded using JDBC.

Additional c-treeACE V10 features include data compression so developers can choose industry-standard compression algorithms, or use their own compression technology for controlling the precise balance between performance and size of data.