Burlington, Massachusetts-based Object Design Inc unveiled version 4.0 of its object-oriented database ObjectStore 4.0 at DB Expo in San Francisco. The latest version of the database has been enhanced for scalability, security and reliability, and designed to support large numbers of concurrent users. It is also at the heart of ObjectStore Component Architecture, also announced at the Expo and described as a comprehensive open framework of products, tools and technologies to enable end-users to develop object-oriented applications while retaining access and use of legacy systems and applications. Object Design says specific improvements to ObjectStore include Multi-Version Concurrency Control, which provides data access for large numbers of concurrent users; symmetric multiprocessing/asynchronous input-output that takes advantage of modern operating systems’ threading capabilities by increasing the overall throughput of the database system, enabling it to scale to multi-user configurations; enhancements to collections and query facility that enable users to store large numbers of objects and perform complex queries on collections of objects; and additional thread support that automatically performs the inter-thread locking needed to serialise client interactions with the server, making development of multi-threaded applications easier. Increased reliability and security capabilities include archive logging, which automatically archives new data added to the database between back-ups; distributed back-up to enable complete transaction-consistent back-ups across multiple ObjectStore servers; and the ability to customise database access by asserting access privileges for higher granularities of control over the data. And the company says that the 4.0 release also has compiler heterogeneity that enables interoperability among clients using different compilers. ObjectStore 4.0 will be available in July under Solaris and HP-UX Unixes, and Windows NT, and the company plans versions for all major Unix systems as well as for OS/2 and Windows. Packages start at $3,800, depending on configuration, and run-time licence pricing is also available for independent software vendors and development organisations.
