Progress Software Corp will release its relational database, Enterprise, as a standalone product in the first half of next year, possibly to be marketed as Super Enterprise. Until now Enterprise has only been available bundled with its application development environment. Progress also says it is still investigating ways of storing objects in its database (CI No 3,015), and there are no firm plans. Object technology has not featured too strongly in the company’s database strategy to date; it opted to go down the Binary Large Object (BLOB) route rather than pure objects a la Object Design Inc or an object-relational hybrid like Informix Software Inc’s Universal Server. The (relational) database is receiving a major reworking in preparation for the release – it should support up to 10,000 concurrent transactions – though the company’s not giving much away about the redesign. What Progress will say is that it will consist of two components, a storage engine for tuning and structuring the data, and an SQL engine, which will handle query and maintenance of the data. According to the company it will be possible for a database administrator to manually move data between different ‘storage areas’, which may reside on different machines, to achieve load-balancing. Remote monitoring, configuration and tuning of the database will be possible from a web browser. Standards support will include ODBC, JDBC, J/SQL and XBSA; the database will probably be up on the major varieties of Unix and Windows NT.
