Following what it claims is 12 months of intense research, O2 Technology Inc has announced the release of the latest version of its object database system, claiming it is vastly improved because it is database independent. Version 5.0’s database independence comes in the form of O2 Java Binding, technology announced last year (CI No 3,026) that enables an application written in Java or C++ to run directly on top of any relational database or the O2 system without users having to recompile it. The Palo Alto, California-based French company says the latest release, which is currently in Beta testing, has shown to be around five times faster than version 4.6, and says that with a bit of tweaking it should run at around 10 times the speed when the product goes on general release in September. O2 Technology claims the product is the first commercial database in the world to combine page server architecture and object locking architecture, which enables the application to select the best locking mechanism for the program. Commenting on the feature, O2’s vice president for North American sales and marketing, Kevin Castillo said: We know we are the only commercial database in the industry that can do it. Version 5.0’s footprint has been reduced to around a tenth of the size of 4.6’s footprint, down to about 1.5Mb. The new release also pays caters for integration of heterogeneous systems and applications, and includes technology that enables full support for server-server, server-client and client-client levels. The product incorporates a standard Object Database Connectivity interface providing access to all ODBC compliant tools, while object-relational transaction technology enables full support for SQL 92. In the past the company’s main business has been generated from the telecommunications industry, but the finance sector has shown increasing interest in recent times in Europe, and Castillo says it is just breaking in the US. The O2 database Version 5.0 runs on Windows 95, Windows NT and most major flavors of Unix, with prices starting at $4,000 for an NT system and $6,000 for the Unix version.
