| Windows CE gains lightweight embedded database |
Nov. 10, 2005
A database consultancy in Seattle is beta-testing a lightweight, cross-platform database for mobile and embedded applications. ITTIA's Fuel database currently supports Windows CE on x86 platforms, has a footprint of about 200KB, and was written from scratch with substantial design input from hundreds of database customers, the company says.
According to ITTIA CEO Sasan Montessori, most database products evolve from custom applications written for a single client. With Fuel, ITTIA decided to consciously create a product from scratch based on a large volume of feedback from potential customers. "Our engineers spent several months having one-on-one conversations with engineers and developers worldwide," Montessori says.
He adds, "It doesn't support SQL, ODBC, or XML yet, because we did not hear back that they wanted that. Instead, it has cool capabilities such as a single file architecture, and dynamic schema alteration."
According to ITTIA lead engineer David Best, an entire Fuel database -- including catalog, index files, data files -- resides in a single file that is portable across architectures, regardless of endian-ness. "It's simple to manage and install," Best says.
Another cool feature for embedded deployments is a plug-in infrastructure for the "allocators" that actually write data into the various places on the filesystem that comprise the database. Modularity here allows the database to be easily adapted for various flash filesystems, Best says. "Our journaling mechanism -- the way we allocate pages and grow the journal -- is set up to play well with flash memory," he claims.
Best adds that ITTIA is looking for customer feedback, in terms of specific flash filesystems to write allocators for.
Rounding out Fuel's top features are support for BLOBs (binary large objects), MVCC (multi-versioning concurrency control), hot backup support, and whole-database encryption. Also, Fuel also supports transactions, and complies with the principles of ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability), ITTIA says.
Montessori says early customer deployments have ranged between 150 and 250KB in footprint. Fuel offers a well-documented C++ API, the company says. A number of large customers are currently testing the product in applications such as mobile devices and telematic tracking devices.
ITTIA is best-known for db.*, an embeddable database that it adopted in August of 2004 when its originators contributed it to the open source community after going out of business.
Availability
Fuel, with support for Windows CE on x86, is currently in beta test. A royalty bearing licensing option starting at $5 per developer will include version upgrades. Non-royalty bearing, single-version licensing will also be available.
Regarding FUEL support for Windows CE running on ARM processors, a company spokesperson told WindowsForDevices.com: "There is no good reason why it wouldn't work, but we haven't tested this configuration yet. We definitely plan on [releasing] support for Windows CE on ARM in the future."
ITTIA will host a series of one-hour webinars covering technical and business-related aspects of Fuel, starting on Wednesday, Nov. 16. Additional details can be found here.
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