In the light of Oracle Corp’s Sedona problems last week, it seems as though Computer Associates Inc may have had the right idea after all – object technology and relational technology just doesn’t mix. Yesterday, Computer Associates unveiled a new look OpenIngres 2.0 relational database, and promised the launch of Jasmine, its object-oriented database next month. Since Computer Associates acquired Ingres from the Ask Group three years ago, OpenIngres has been completely re-designed, with Version 2.0 the net result. It ships at the end of June, and focuses on performance enhancements such as multi-threading, and a single distributed cache system. The input-output capabilities have also been re-jigged by using the operating system input-output functionality rather than functions built-in to the database engine itself. Computer Associates claims a high level of parallelism written into the core engine such as the ability to carry out backup and restore in parallel. But parallel query options and free indexing won’t ship until OpenIngres 3.0, which is still 18 months to two years away. Extensions to object libraries have also been added to include video and audio, plus an object operator which sorts out data overlaps. This tentative object support is purely for occasional object users rather than heavy duty users, the company says. Computer Associates says the product is particularly suitable for running database driven Web sites, and makes its easy for developers to directly embed SQL statements into an HTML page. OpenIngres 2.0 runs on Windows NT and Unix-based systems, with Hewlet-Packard Co’s HP-UX, IBM Corp’s AIX and Sun Microsystems Inc’s Solaris the first to be available. On the object front, Jasmine, which is already late, is intended to surface for the first time at the firm’s CA World user conference in New Orleans next month. Some changes have had to be made to include more Java support. The database, which was developed using Fujitsu Ltd’s ODBMII object-oriented database, is expected to ship with Jade, its object oriented development environment; multimedia class libraries, ActiveX and JDBC Java database connectivity support, along with ODQL the native object database query language. No prices were given.
