dataWeb has released version 5 of its premium desktop database engine TurboDB. The new version puts its focus on typical features of database servers, which are now brought to an embedded database. These features include integrity rules, transactions, full-text search, strong encryption and correlated sub-queries.
With TurboDB 5, programmers can define checks on the row level as well as integrity rules between rows of different tables (foreign keys). TurboDB now also offers transaction support with automatic crash recovery, which means that transactions are rolled-back even if the client crashed in between. Full-text search is another important feature, available in TurboDB for a long time, but completely re-implemented in the current version, to make full-text indexes maintained and much faster. There is strong encryption for database tables and last but not least, support for sub-queries in all flavors including correlated ones.
In a presentation at the German Developer Conference in Frankfurt last week, Peter Pohmann, dataWeb's presi-dent and chief architect explained: "Reliable transactions are much harder to implement in a desktop database engine than in a database server, because there is no central instance that manages the clients and detects failures and crashes. However, we wanted to deliver this important feature also to those programmers, who do not wish to sacrifice the unbeatable ease of deployment and installation."
In addition to the above-mentioned features, TurboSQL now also includes the table operators UNION, EXCEPT and INTERSECT, the CASE construct as well as the TOP and the CAST keyword. On a general level there have been improvements on performance, SQL conformance, extensions to data types and many more. Despite the sheer number of enhancements, the programming interfaces for .NET languages and Delphi/C++ programs have undergone only minimalistic changes necessary to cope with the new features. Existing applications work with TurboDB 5 with just a few if any modifications.
TurboDB 5 is available for the Borland Win32 development tools Delphi and C++ Builder starting from version 5 up to the upcoming version code-named DeXter. It is also available for Visual Studio.NET 2003 (all lan-guages) and is currently in preparation for .NET framework 2.0 and VS.NET 2005. The Professional Edition of TurboDB costs 499 EUR/USD per developer seat and does not demand royalties. Quantity discounts are avail-able. A trial edition of TurboDB can be downloaded at the company's Web site www.dataweb.com.
TurboDB is a renowned desktop database engine since the year of 2000. Written completely in the Delphi pro-gramming language, it is a natural choice for all programmers, who want to replace the Borland Database Engine through a powerful and up-to-date alternative. TurboDB compiles completely into a Delphi or C++ program and therefore offers unbeatable ease of deployment not to speak about its large additional feature set compared to the BDE.