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Table Of Contents
Chapter 8
vFabric SQLFire Features and Benefits
The sections that follow summarize main features. The SQLFire community site provides additional information about
the features and benets of SQLFire and a comparison of SQLFire to other data management systems. See also the
SQLFire product page.
In-Memory Data Management with Optimized Disk Persistence
SQLFire enables applications to manage data entirely in memory by using partitioning and synchronous replication
to distribute the data across numerous SQLFire members. SQLFire also provides an optimized disk persistence
mechanism with a non-ushing algorithm to maintain high performance in applications that require stable, long-term
storage. Applications can also use SQLFire to actively cache table data from a traditional disk-based RDBMS.
Continuous Availability, Elastically Scaled, Low Latency
A exible architecture enables SQLFire to pool memory and disk resources from hundreds of clustered members. This
clustered approach provides extremely high throughput, predictable latency, dynamic and linear scalability, and
continuous availability of data. By collocating application logic with data and executing application logic in parallel,
SQLFire substantially increases application throughput. It also transparently re-executes application logic if a server
fails.
Highly Adaptable to Existing Applications
SQLFire is implemented entirely in Java, and it can be embedded directly within a Java application. You can also
deploy SQLFire members as standalone servers that participate in a cluster. Java applications can connect to a SQLFire
cluster using the provided JDBC drivers. Microsoft .NET and Mono applications can connect using the provided
ADO.NET driver.
The use of JDBC, ADO.NET, and SQL means that many existing database applications can be easily adapted to use
a SQLFire cluster. SQLFire introduces several extensions to common SQL Data Denition Language (DDL) statements
to manage data partitioning, replication, synchronization with data sources, and other features. However, most common
queries and Data Manipulation Language (DML) statements are based on ANSI SQL-92, so experienced database
application developers can use their knowledge of SQL when working with SQLFire.
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