Tracking the current trend for high-availability offerings in the object database market, Object Design Inc, Burlington, Massachusetts, says it is almost ready with its promised asynchronous replication technologies that will provide failover, with reading and limited writing facilities, plus extended RAID support for its ObjectStore database (CI No 2,792). The RAID and failover software will ship next quarter as an add-on to existing ObjectStore implementations or as a packaged high-availability offering. Object Design says it is not going the whole hog and doing synchronous replication a la Objectivity Inc (CI No 2,681), claiming those tasks are more suited to through-and-through fault-tolerant concerns such as its Stratus Computer Inc’s Isis Distributed Systems Inc partner rather than database vendors masquerading as fault-tolerant vendors. Isis is currently building a version of its high-availability replication software for use with ObjectStore. The expected performance monitoring tool built for it by its 20% shareholder IBM Corp will be released in a couple of weeks as ObjectStore Performance Expert, OPE. Object Design’s promised SQL client, which provides access to ObjectStore C++ data from SQL-based tools and applications, is expected soon as ObjectStore Inspector. It is a forms-driven front-end query system. Other developments now under way include providing support for using ObjectStore as a back-end Web server, Web content and Java applet hosting. The project to integrate ObjectStore with Iona Technologies Ltd’s Orbix object request broker as Orbix-ObjectStore, enabling objects to be stored and retrieved from the Object Design database using Orbix, is still und-er way. Object Design says it is not seeking a relationship with IBM beyond that which it already has.
