SQL Advisor

'Fastest Consistent Database' Claims MVVM Affinity

In-memory database comes from Starcounter, a Swedish company that announced the world's "fastest consistent database" thanks to patent-pending technology.

• By David Ramel
• 05/21/2012

Here's a new one: The maker of a new high-performance database claims it especially lends itself to development using the popular Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) programming pattern.

The in-memory database comes from Starcounter, a Swedish company that last week announced what it calls the world's "fastest consistent database" thanks to patent-pending technology (VMDBMS) that melds an application virtual machine with a database management system. Starcounter said it avoids fragmentation and keeps data in one place in RAM -- rather than copying it back and forth from disk to RAM and from the database to the application like other systems. This allows the database to reportedly attain speeds 10 times faster than other high-performance systems and 100 times faster than more traditional RDBMSs.

While that's all relatively typical feeds-and-speeds stuff, I thought it was interesting that company founder Joachim Wester told me the new product offers special advantages to database developers because it lends itself to the MVVM pattern. That pattern, of course, is currently all the rage in the .NET Framework development world, allowing separation of business and logic concerns, enabling better unit testing and letting everybody know that you use the latest and greatest programming fad.

"Having your business objects as your database makes popular .NET patterns such as MVVM (Knockout or Angular) very natural," Ester said in an e-mail interview. He expounded:

"Starcounter can host the ViewModel on the server. When using popular frameworks such as KnockoutJS, you can program all your logic in C#. You manipulate the ViewModel on the server. Starcounter transparently syncs it with the browser. As most ViewModels derive their data from the database, the server can inexpensively keep each browser's ViewModel live on the server … the data was in RAM to begin with anyway. And as the server controls the ViewModel, you get security without an effort. It simply does not matter if you manipulate the client code. You can leave out the JavaScript programming and code simple local type-checked C#. Our favorite MVVM stack is Starcounter combined with Angular, a Knockout alternative from Google."

Sounds pretty cool, except for that Google thing. What about .NET? "Starcounter hooks into the .NET [Framework] itself" Ester said. "It is not a framework. It lives underneath .NET. So if you know how to program in .NET, you already know how to use Starcounter."

Wester also pointed out other benefits for database developers using Starcounter, primarily more simplicity, or, as he put it: "no separate database schema, no glue code, no O/R mapping." And with this simplicity reducing the lines of code a programmer has to write, the overall development effort is simplified and bug-tracking efforts are reduced, he said.

See the company's Web site for more information on the new database, currently available as a free beta download to a limited number of customers.

What do you think? Is Starcounter on to something? Will this new database simplify your development? Comment here or drop me a line.