As expected, Ontos Inc will this week unveil a new revision of its Ontos/DB object database system. The Burlington, Massachusetts-based company says Ontos/DB R3.0’s open storage management developer’s kit – built on its newly-formed Object Cohesive Enterprise architecture – provides the basis for integration with non-object information sources and applications such as relational or hierarchical databases, video, CD-ROM and images. The new release also includes extensible versioning and configuration management for viewing data in different ways, on-line schema evolution and instance migration for changing the database model, and semantic concurrency control, said to provide simultaneous updates of the same objects. Ontos/DB R3.0 is up under SunOS, Santa Cruz Operation Inc Unix, HP-UX, AIX and OS/2, with a Solaris implementation under way; iAPX-86 versions are $5,300, other Unix implementations go from $9,300. The open storage management developer’s kit is not out until June and will cost from $5,000. Ontos is also hauling itself into the Microsoft Corp Windows NT market on the back of a deal it has won with Pacific Gas & Electric Inc. Ontos is supplying software, services and training to the US utility which will develop distributed object applications for its 20,000-strong network of systems, using Windows NT and Chicago. Ontos says it has already prototyped the NT development environment database and will offer a full version of Ontos/DB R3.0 for NT in two or three months priced at $5,500. Ontos, missing out on some of the large OEM deals its object database rivals have sealed, claims to be lining up new OEM customers and channels for R3.0 which it hopes will see 60% or 70% of its product move through indirect channels. The company plans two further integration modules in the third quarter.
