On Sun, 2006-04-09 at 22:04 +1000, Lindsay Holmwood wrote:
> Guest speaker Christof Wittig will be talking about db4o
For those of you who have no idea what this is or why it might be
interesting, Christof is the CEO of db4objects, Inc, the company around
what I find to be a remarkable native (Java or .Net) object oriented
database that is available under the GPL. I met him when he was in
Sydney in January. I got word that he's going to be back in town this
week, and a few weeks back asked Lindsay if he was looking for a topic
for DebSIG this month. Not every day a businessman decides to GPL his
product.
OODBMSes came and went as a technology in the late 80s/early 90s, so you
might be saying WTF? Those efforts largely face planted because they
tried to create a generic object syntax and a complicated meta query
structure rather than working in the native syntax of {insert your OO
language here}. db4o is really rather different. It is trivially easy to
use and surprisingly robust. For me, working in Java on Linux as I do,
it has given me a reliable persistence store for my applications without
any of the usual object-relational mapping nightmare that would crop up
if I were to try and use a more traditional RDBMS.
While their primary market is embedded devices, this is not limited to
phones and what not like you might think. I gather that one of their
earliest clients uses db4o as the live datastore underneath the
signalling system for an entire metropolitan railway, which I gather
involves insane numbers of objects per second. Pretty cool - and if it
does that then I'm quite certain it can handle the stuff I throw at it.
Anyway, Christof is a lovely fellow and presents well. You should enjoy
his chat so I encourage you to stop by the new debsig location. And
thanks to openskills for gatecrashing their party.
AfC
Sydney
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