jBASE jEDI Gets a Turbo Boost
jBASE International
jBASE International recently introduced a major enhancement to its
jEDI Development Kit which radically improves the jQL performance for
the entire jEDI suite. Recent benchmark results demonstrated
performance levels very close to – and in some cases surpassing –
native jBASE files.
The jEDI (jBASE External Device Interface) enables applications to
achieve seamless integration with foreign databases without any
changes to the jBASE MultiValue BASIC application code and logic.
Data can be stored in an external database such as Microsoft SQL
Server, Oracle or IBM’s DB2. Other external databases are supported
using an ODBC jEDI ensuring that jBASE can be integrated with any
database that supports ODBC.
This means that any jBASE application can read and write to whichever
database is required by the customer. A customer can select their
preferred database vendor or environment to suit their needs whether
this is low cost, high performance, local support or any other factor.
In the future, and if the need arises, they can switch database vendor
without altering the jBASE MultiValue application.
The jEDI separates the BASIC application from the data source and
provides a consistent view of all I/O to the calling program and to
the rest of the system. jBASE comes with drivers for its own file
system. jEDI drivers relating to the relational databases are
available as a jEDI Development Kit (jDK).
It would be reasonable to assume that native jBASE file I/O is faster
than manipulating RDBMS tables, e.g. when a jBASE query (jQL) is
executing on a large RDBMS data set the response times would be slower
than a query against the native jBASE file. The reason being that the
jDK was designed as a generic tool set to work on many different
RDBMS. However improvements to the query architecture in jQL and the
jDK have allowed the jEDI developer to intercept the jQL query and
perform some or all of the work involved. In a nutshell, this means
translating the jQL to SQL and returning a result set (typically a set
of record IDs or a count depending on the jQL statement). It also
means that the developer can enhance the jDK for the specific
application concerned.
Recently a major South American Software House evaluated options for
migrating their application from UniVerse to products that enabled
their application to use a relational database. For the evaluation a
section of the application was migrated to jBASE and other vendors’
products. Initial results indicated that all of the products in the
evaluation were slower when writing to a relational database. While
each vendor was able to improve their performance, the jBASE jEDI
delivered significantly faster performance. Final results
demonstrated that jBASE was manipulating SQL faster than the other
products and the improvement to the jBASE jEDI was so profound that
the query response times were in many cases faster on the relational
database than on native jBASE j4 files! The South American Software
House is now a new jBASE International Partner.
For more information, visit www.jbase.com or email sa...@jbase.com.