News

Lock-free ANTs Data Server updated

• By Alan R. Earls
• March 17, 2004

ANTs Software Inc., a Burlingame, Calif.-based developer of SQL database management systems, recently announced availability of Version 2.2 of its ANTs Data Server. The product, a standards-compliant relational database management system that includes some new design approaches, now also includes support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as well as replication with automatic failover, stored procedures, triggers and event mechanisms.

The new automatic failover feature in the ANTs Data Server enables replication of the data store and assures maximum system uptime and application availability. Stored procedures, triggers and event mechanisms, also included in Version 2.2, can simplify development and accelerate deployment of new applications, according to the company.

Ken Ruotolo, executive vice president at ANTs, said the underlying technology of Data Server -- built from the ground up starting in 1999 -- is still the big story. "Most RDBMSs are built on technology from the 1970s and 1980s, when applications were usually connected to relatively few users, networks were slower and there was less need for concurrency," said Ruotolo. Thus, most databases use locking techniques to ensure that only one user at a time gains access to the same data.

"Our breakthrough is lock-free data structures that permit processing of many thousands of transactions concurrently," Ruotolo explained. He also pointed out that the product takes advantage of the relatively low cost of memory in modern machines and does away with the practice of using main memory only for cache and maintaining the actual data structure on disk.

"The solution is not just multiples faster than other products in the market, it supports a significantly larger number of sessions at the higher performance numbers," said William Hurley, senior analyst at the Enterprise Application Group, Portland, Ore.

ANTs Data Server's new stored procedure capabilities, which offer a set of programming constructs modeled on popular RDBMS stored procedure languages, can potentially simplify migration of stored procedure routines from other RDBMS vendors while triggers and event mechanisms enable support for development of critical real-time applications.

Analyst Hurley said the solution can act as a repository back-ending new or migrated applications, and it can front end existing RDBMS solutions as well. "The flexibility of deployment schemas allows users to adopt a new solution from a new vendor with minimum infrastructure impact and risk," he explained. As an example, Hurley cited rolling a multi-instance, multi-template SAP deployment up into one or two global images.

"That will exercise many RDBMSs to their limit," he said. By contrast, "ANTs can be deployed as a complementary, or core, technology to assist in these challenging and mission-critical projects," he said.