Cloudscape Gains Momentum

A reader writes: "There's been a lot of bits written recently about the growth of Open Source databases; as well as IBM's patent gift, as their release of the Java database Cloudscape. There's a contest running on SourceForge.net around Cloudscape; download and run with it." SF.net is part of OSTG, like Slashdot.

As usual

[cpct0]

Only one entry per person and you must be a US or Canadian (except for Quebec) resident over the age of 18 to play.

I'm from Quebec ... and as usual, contents makers will not take the trouble of being compatible with Loto-Québec's rules. They are easy to follow, strangely... not a lot of stuff to fill in. It mainly is there to make sure we don't get screwed up

... and it also means everyone in the other countries will not be able to participate. Yeehaa

What's in a name?

[Trejkaz]

Wasn't Cloudscape donated to the Apache project, where it changed its name to Derby? Don't IBM think that offering a download of "Cloudscape" is going to confuse developers?

Re:IF......

[Anonymous Cowherd X]

You can win an Ipod or TShirt only if you are US or Canada resident....are they trying to encorage inmigration? The rest of the world should not bother about using Cloudscape I assume...

Let's see, most people would need at least an hour to write a JDBC application to search the tables for some silly magic word. Most eligible contestants from the US and Canada who have the knowledge to write such an application make more than enough in one hour to buy an iPod and a T-shirt. So why should anyone even bother to play this game, just for the fun of it? You develop JDBC applications all day long and then in your spare time you do the same for fun... and you might even win a T-shirt. Wow, they really know how to motivate people! Alienating the rest of the world and giving people a sense of worthlessness about their achievements is not the best way to make a product popular. But I'm just clouding the issue...

Here is a swell idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets see how many open source projects we can get going at one time to compete against one another with absolutely no standardization! YESSSS!

But seriously -- this is getting out of hand. If every single company, individual, etc. starts an open source project what does that accomplish? Nothing. It brings about 100 different alternatives to the market most of which would never be viable in a commercial environment.

News flash: devote time and effort to succesful projects that extend the reach of the open source community. Another open source database project is just well... another project.

Re:Java IS slow

[WillerZ]

Portable Java is slow, because you have to use the abstract types sun give you rather than exploit your platform's capabilities.

The JVM initialisation time is waaay longer than the C runtime initialisation time on every platform I've tested, which makes short-running processes feel awful in Java.

Finally, whenever it becomes necessary to actually _do_ anything, the JNI must be crossed, and that's slow.

Phil

So how does it compare to the alternatives?

[Anonymous Coward]

Namely HSQLDB [sourceforge.net] and Mckoi [mckoi.com]?

Anyone find a decent article comparing the three yet?

Read the License

[Anonymous Coward]

How many of you actually read through the license? Did you see the part where they can use any of your contact information and provide ANYTHING they get about you. So, it looks like IBM is now in the business of providing SPAM databases as well.

I should note that I stopped there. I will unlikely ever download and use the product, regardless of usefullness.

Re:I've written a review of this

[inertia187]

reasonably full SQL92 syntax;

Actually, I think the biggest limitation [apache.org] is the 18 character names for constraints (et. al).

It is fast

[sasoon]

Download and you will see that it is fast. Have not tried Derby, but I tried http://mckoi.com/database/ [mckoi.com] 2 years ago. It was very fast. Under win32 I compared it with a MS jet engine database (mdb file) with the jdbc odbc bridge driver, almost equal speed, plus the possibility to work with unicode strings.

Re:But that is not embeddable

[duffer_01]

"Embedding a database in an application can be very useful, such as in a desktop GUI where you cannot rely on network communication or maybe don't want to bother with a client/server environment."

I completely disagree. I think most people think that SQL Anywhere is just used for client/server communication when in fact you can also easily use it for standalone use in embedded applications. In fact, I would argue that SQL Anywhere is far easier to embed than Cloudscape since you only need to deal with 2 database files (db and log) which can be copied from any of the supported OS's (Linux, Win32, WinCE, etc). You can simply embed the dll's and exe's that you require for you application directly into your install. Add the fact that SQL Anywhere takes a lot less space than Cloudscape and you have a much better embedded solution.

Re:Yes, it is.

[Ryosen]

I think you might be misunderstanding what JNI is. Each Java runtime provides its own implementation to the native underlying system libraries. Java does not communicate through JNI for I/O of any kind.

JNI itself is a generic abstraction layer to the underlying operating system. It provides a mechanism whereby dynamic libraries not directly supported by the runtime engine can still be accessed by a Java application.

Threading, sockets and GUI are implemented via the native system libraries. AWT used to be very slow (as opposed to just being merely slow today) due to its own multi-layed abstraction. But at no time was JNI the conduit for these systems.

Further reading: http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/native1.1/ concepts/index.html [sun.com]