O2 Technology, Inc. Announces Version 5.0 of Its Object Database System; Version 5 to provide high performance for large databases, adaptability to existing and changing environments, and database independence

Business Wire, April 14, 1997

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 14, 1997--O2 Technology, Inc., a leading provider of object database management systems, today announced Version 5.0 of its object database system. This major new release brings improved performance for large databases (tens to hundreds of giga bytes), provides new features allowing O2 applications to be easily and efficiently integrated into existing environments and to adapt themselves to changes in these environments. Finally it introduces a unique major feature: database independence, the property of running the same application on top of an object or a relational application.

High performance for large databases

This major revision is the result of an intense R&D investment to improve the performance of the O2 System, both in terms of response time and in terms of transaction throughput. "We are seeing performance improvements of an order of magnitude in some transactional benchmarks," says Guy Ferran, VP Engineering at O2 Technology.

A number of new features were introduced to dramatically enhance performance:

-- Adaptive locking allows the system to lock data at the page level, and remains at this locking granularity as long as there is no page conflict, thus delivering the best transactional performance when few conflicts occur, because of a very light locking overhead. If there is a page conflict, the system starts locking objects within the page to solve the conflict, thus delivering the best transaction throughput.

-- Through a unique piece of carefully designed engineering, O2 is the first commercial database system in the world to combine a page server architecture (proven to deliver the best transactional throughput and response time) and object level locking (proven to deliver the best transaction response time). This unique technology is the result of a major R&D investment done in the context of several European Esprit projects, in cooperation with companies and organizations such as Alcatel, Bull and the University of Frankfurt.

-- Call back locking allows transactions to keep objects they have locked on the client after transaction commit and not to request them from the server again if they are needed. This decreases the number of client/server communications and improves response time.

-- Thanks to the use of shared libraries, the overall footprint size of the system has been strongly decreased. For some software configurations, the footprint size can be as much as 10 times smaller than in Version 4.6 and be as small as 1.5 megabytes. This improves performance since the size of page and object buffers both on the client and the server can be increased.

-- Numerous other improvements, such as in memory RPCs, extensible volumes, optimized index mechanisms and multithread support provide superior performance.

Fitting in an existing and changing environment

Today's applications have to be integrated into and cooperate with complex environments: heterogeneous hardware and software platforms, other object systems and applications through ORBs, other database systems through SQL, third party database tools through ODBC, transactional monitors through an XA interface. The O2 system already has a number of tools to make this integration easy, such as O2Web and O2DBAccess. New features were added that allow for a more complete and easier integration:

-- With Version 5.0, O2 Technology brings full support for heterogeneity at server/server, server/client and client/client levels: a server of type A can support clients of type B and C, where A, B and C can be any O2 supported platforms (RISC or Intel, Unix or Windows). Furthermore, a database created and managed on server of type A can be used on a platform of type B. This support also includes language and compiler independence: different clients can manipulate the database objects through different language compilers (compiler independence) and even through different languages (language independence)

-- O2Corba offers the full integration of a CORBA compliant ORB to O2. This includes the object service support for queries, transactions and collections, and export tools to automatically generate IDL class descriptions as well as IDL C implementation classes from a set of O2 classes.

-- Version 5.0 provides full support for the ISO DTP XA standard in every API of O2. This allows transactional monitors such as Encina or Tuxedo to run distributed versions of O2, or to run O2 in conjunction with other relational engines, thanks to the direct support of a standard two phase commit protocol.

-- Version 5.0 brings full support for SQL 92. This is done through an object-relational transaction technology: the ODMG object classes are automatically translated into an ANSI SQL relational view that can be queried in SQL92. SQL queries on that view are then translated into OQL and benefit from the high performance of the O2 query interpreter and optimizer.

-- Version 5.0 brings a standard ODBC interface that provides access to all ODBC compliant database tools.