Daffodil Software today announced the launch of One$DB, a free version of its Java database - Daffodil DB.

One$DB is exactly the same as Daffodil DB, barring a few features such as Full Text Search, Persistent Stored Modules and Row Sets. In spite of these features being excluded, One$DB still remains comparable to the best that the Java database market has to offer.

Against convention, One$DB does not put any restriction with regards to number of connections, CPU usage and total data storage. Developers can now build, test and deploy new applications at zero license costs. Daffodil will also provide free support for the product through its community forum and will also offer affordable commercial support under its One$/day support program.

“One$DB is a concept that is will prove to be hugely beneficial to SME’s / small ISV’s�, said Yogesh Agarwal, CEO (Daffodil Software). “It offers one of the major benefits of Open Source software by being free and also provides the added advantage of world-class, company-provided support. We believe in being open and transparent to users; consequently, making an Open Source project around Daffodil DB could be our next step�, he added.

“The availability of One$DB as a free version is very good newsâ€?, commented Dr. Jürgen Pitschke of Business Consulting Saxony. “The European market will be reciprocative towards such a product. Especially small and medium sized software companies will value the fact that they can develop applications with the free version without additional startup costs.â€?

To learn what has prompted the genesis of One$DB, read the Business Model Whitepaper(http://www.daffodildb.com/PDF/white-paper.pdf). To learn more and to download One$DB, visit http://www.daffodildb.com

Derby.


I have to say that I've tried Daffodil, and it's a real decent product. But it's hard to belive that these shifts in strategy aren't directly due to Derby... when Derby was first announced, one of my first few thoughts was: "There goes Daffodil".

Anyway, best of luck to the Daffodil folks. You do make a fine product.

Has any one done an objective feature comparison ?
Performance Comparison ?


Also ,how does one graduate to a full production style ( Oracle in my case) database from one these Java databses ? We had to write our own conversion which was a painful process.

bad mash,

Have a look at Comparison sheet to see how we compare with other db's.

With regards to migration from Oracle, we support most of the syntax and features like sequences, triggers, procedures with PL/SQL. That how we are in the process of making our db compatible with Compiere ERP , with is currently compatible only with Oracle.

what about a comparison with firebird db or sap db ? I've heard they are both very good.

I have been using SapDB befire it became MaxDB . SapDB is an tru blue Enterprese class database. So ite more like comparing apples to oranges.

Daffodil is more for ISVs looking to embed a DB solution.

The question is at what db size , doer you ask users running Embdeded Databses( Daffodil, Mckoi, Derby etc.) to move to an Enterprise db solution.

I have been using SapDB befire it became MaxDB . SapDB is an tru blue Enterprese class database. So ite more like comparing apples to oranges.Daffodil is more for ISVs looking to embed a DB solution.The question is at what db size , doer you ask users running Embdeded Databses( Daffodil, Mckoi, Derby etc.) to move to an Enterprise db solution.

Features-wise, its not an *apples and oranges* game really. One$DB maybe, but not Daffodil DB).

To quote an example, we are working on making our DB compatible with Compiere ERP+CRM solution, which currently works with Oracle. Have a look at Compiere's DB Independence Chat

This is truely indicative of what Daffodil DB can do.

Hi, I did a little searching today and I wanted to share my thoughts on this topic of comparisons for hsqldb vs derby....

I believe that it is not a fair apples to apples comparison to be comparing HSQLDB and Apache Derby (aka Cloudscape). There are some important differences in the functionality provided by HSQLDB and Derby which in turn contribute to how they perform.

1) Transactions:
HSQLDB does *not* support transaction isolation. All transactions run in read uncommitted ( dirty read mode). Transactions read dirty data ( uncommitted data) which is not what you want in case of update transactions/ lets say a banking application.

Derby supports *all* transaction isolation levels. The default tranaction isolation that it runs in is READ_COMMITTED. Derby is guaranteeing that if you run in read committed mode, you will not be reading dirty data.

2) In-memory database:
HSQLDB by default creates table in memory , so if you use CREATE TABLE the table is in memory. This means with large amounts of data there is high memory utilization and the application may be limited to the amount of memory available and may perform slow if table does not fit in memory.

http://www.jboss.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=ConfigJBossMQDB talks about out of memory errors as a result.
http://www.devx.com/IBMCloudscape/Article/21773 this article talks about how this could lead to scalability issues

Derby is disk based. Derby uses a page cache to keep recently used pages in memory and writes data to disk. Thus the memory consumption is stable and can be used for large amounts of data.

This difference is important to note as the speed in these 2 cases are different. This seems to be reason why it is not ideal to compare speed differences here.

3) Reliability:

Derby is guaranteeing that if your system crashes in any way that committed transactions will remain committed. This requires that when a transaction commits, logs are synced to the disk. Syncing to the disk takes time.

But on the other hand, it seems like hsqldb is not failsafe as the log file is not flushed (synced) to the disk after a commit.

http://nagoya.apache.org/eyebrowse/ReadMsg?listName=derby-user at db dot apache dot org&msgNo=11
http://nagoya.apache.org/eyebrowse/ReadMsg?listName=derby-user at db dot apache dot org&msgNo=13 gives a little more detail on the log flusher thread for hsqldb.

Thus it seems necessary to consider these differences before one compares raw numbers.

Some links from web on hsqldb and derby:
http://forums.atlassian.com/thread.jspa?threadID=6153&messageID=248904679
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=127289&threshold=1&commentsort=0&tid=221&tid=198&tid=136&tid=108&tid=8&tid=2&mode=thread&pid=10640524#10642178
http://www.luisdelarosa.com/blog/2004/10/whatever_happen.html
post by stephane TRAUMAT
http://www.jboss.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=ConfigJBossMQDB

Sunitha.

Hi Sunitha,

What did you think of Daffodil? Can you pen a couple of lines regarding how you felt Daffodil stacked up against HSQL and Derby.

Regards, Uday

Best of luck to the Daffodil folks. We make a fine product.

Congrats to you all.

Uday,
     We are using JBoss as app server and hibernate as ORM. We want to evaluate the daffodildb as our backend. Can you give me some idea whether u guys are compatible with these kind of tools or not?

Uday,
     I have checked ur functionality comparison sheet. Can u provide me the performance sheet in the same manner.

Thanks Akash,

One$DB is compatible with almost all leading brands of Application Servers, Web Servers, JDO and Object Mapping tools including JBOSS and Hibernate.

For more information on compatibility of One$DB with other products please visit our compatible products section at http://www.daffodildb.com/compatible-products.html

Sachin Garg
Daffodil Software

I think it may have some impact.. but last I saw, Derby isn't near the point of leaving the incubator.. and even then, it would need to show a good track record based on the changes being made to it..

I think that market will work well with a few players.. I've looked at Derby for a project to convert off of an annoying embedded DB in use right now.. but I'm going to take a closer look at the One$DB solution and see how it fits now.

Hi James,

It nice to get some support for One$DB at the onset. Its true that Derby is at the back of our mind, no denying that. However, we have been thinking of One$DB for some time now - the paradigm being that we need a critical mass of developers using (and thereby endorsing) our Java db.

Paul,

We agree with you that "market will work well with a few players". Further to the same, the differenciation will be on 2 parameters, features and support, both of which are our core strengths.

Have a look at Why One$DB and Support Overview

Cheers,
Uday

Please add other features that Daffodil One$DB will not incorporate: Backup & Restore, XA-Resources.

Too bad, especially 'cause of the Backup & Restore thing since XA usage is not so wild and in some cases it can be dumped.

Regards,
Horia

Horia,

Point taken. Will be including Backup & Restore in our next release. Thanks for the comment.

Congratulation for the full java installer, it's one of the nicer java based installer I've ever seen.

Carlo.

The '$' in the file name is a right pain on Linux,
Greg.

The installer doesn't seem to run on Linux either,

Greg.

Greg,

We have tested One$DB on Redhat and Mandrake. Which Linux are you using??

The $ sign was creating problems with Solaris as well, that has now been changed to "dollar". Hope this will do good to Linux users as well. Please download the new version from http://www.daffodildb.com/download/index.jsp

Anyways thanks for pointing this problem to us.

Sachin Garg

Hi Sachin,

I'm using Redhat 9. I downloaded the new version but it still has the '$' sign in the file name.

This time I downloaded onto a windows box so that I can rename the file before moving it to Linux. The GUI installer hangs (I used GTK) so I'm going to give the CLI version a go.

Regards,
Greg.

How hard is to prepend the filename with "\" when you start it from command line? and how hard is to rename it in bash before running?
and how hard it is to rename it in the save dialog of your browse?

come on...

Congratulations on the launch of One$DB! DaffodilDB has impressive feature set. We plan to add it as a natively supported database in the next release of our JDX OR-Mapper product.

-- Damodar Periwal
Software Tree, Inc.
Simplify Data Integration

Hey Damodar, thats gr8 news for us. Lets move ASAP towards working together.

Sachin

Nice news. How would your $db compare with c'scape and hsql? they are both OS. I like the features your db has. Sply procedures

Mandrake linux 10.1 now ships Daffodil DB v3.3. Have a look at this link.

hey that a great news Uday, i'm a Mandrakelinux user and was waiting for some java databse to be bundled with it as i primarily work on java..

I have been following DaffodilDB for quite some time now and found it to be good (not commercially though :-))as compared to the the open source options available and now by launching One$Db you people have given me all the more reason to switch over from Cloudscape.

Ashu

I think this is a great news for the java developer community. Java developer community was in need of a stable and powerful RDBMS without any complex licensing requirements.

Congratulations to Java developer community & thanks to Daffodil DB team for doing that.

~Deepak

I could not find java.sql.DataSource implementation in One$Db3_4_beta distribution. In Daffodil jdbc reference I see that it can be found in in.co.daffodil.db.jdbc.DBDataSource. But there is no in.co.daffodil.db.jdbc.DBDataSource there. Did you remove it deliberately?

I could not find java.sql.DataSource implementation in One$Db3_4_beta distribution. In Daffodil jdbc reference I see that it can be found in in.co.daffodil.db.jdbc.DBDataSource. But there is no in.co.daffodil.db.jdbc.DBDataSource there. Did you remove it deliberately?

We have not removed the DBDataSource class; however the class has been obfuscated during our release process. A new patch is being uploaded to fix this. Thanks for bringing the issue to our notice. Can you try downloading the latest copy of One$DB again?

Cheers,
Uday Parmar

PS - We also have a community forum where issues relating to our Java database can be discussed. Click here.

Thank you for your soonest reply!

Congratulations ! Technically and commercially a real great application.
When I first saw Daffodil I thought "Why another database between Oracle, MS SQL and MySQL ?". But than I was impressed by the features (pure Jave, SQL compliant, Replicator, ...). So technically a clear GO!
With the One$DB daffodil becomes much more attractive to our main audience small and medium software companies - they don't need to invest upfront in a infrastructure but have a rich functionality available even if prices where not a real stopper before! So daffodil also understand the market commercially. That is what customer expect today.

Some good news for the OS community....Daffodil Software has made Daffodil Replicator (its data replication tool) an Open Source product on SourceForge.net.

Have a look at http://www.daffodildb.com/dbreplicator.html

Cheers,
Uday

one$db Embedded looks good.
Sadly JBuilder (9 & 2005) doesnt recognise the jdbc driver.

I suspect it is Borlands fault, JB is picky about drivers.

I need to use JBuilder because
1) it is a visual IDE, drag & drop components
2) databound components
2) It has builtin CRUD

I wish I knew other IDEs which do 1) 2) & 3)
myEclipse certainly doesnt.

[Web-based & Linux worlds sem to be stuck in the hand-crafted code era, Suns Creator looks good, hope it gets better soon]