This Tutorial Provides a Hands-on Review of the Altibase Database, which is an Open-Source, ACID & SQL Compliant, and Relational Database Management System (RDBMS):
This article will give you a detailed review of the Altibase Database which includes product features, pricing, customer support, advantages, and limitations of this in-memory plus on-disk database.
Altibase is a Freely Downloadable, enterprise-grade, and high-performance RDBMS.
Let’s Explore It Now!!
What You Will Learn:
Altibase Open Source Database Overview
Altibase is the only hybrid database in the industry that flawlessly combines an in-memory database along with an on-disk database into a single database product using a uniform interface that streamlines data processing for utmost efficiency.
Thus, it eliminates the need to buy an in-memory DB and on-disk DB separately.
=> Altibase Official Website
=> Check The Github Repository
The hybrid structure empowers Altibase to enjoy the advantages of both in-memory and disk storage while obscuring their corresponding weaknesses. For high performance, it allows the use of memory tables and for economical storage, it allows the use of disk tables.
Altibase is known to be 10x faster than traditional on-disk databases. It is 2x faster than the other in-memory databases. Altibase has served more than 650 clients around the world and has done around 6000 deployments in various domains of the industry including 8 Fortune Global 500 companies.
Type: Enterprise-grade Open Source database.
License: Free. As this is a free database, you do not need to purchase any license to use Altibase.
Subscription: Subscription fees are lower than all mainstream DBMS providers.
Industry: Enterprise Software
Headquarters: The company manufacturing this product is known as ‘Altibase’. It has two headquarters i.e. Greater New York City, Seoul, South Korea.
Major Clients: Altibase has its customers in the Telecom, Financial Services, Manufacturing, and Utility Industry. Major clients include China Unicom, Posco, Samsung, HP, Hyundai, Toshiba Medical, and many other world-famous companies.
Technical Support: 24/7/365 customer service is available globally.
Scalability: Scales vertically and horizontally.
User Size: This is suitable for all i.e. Small (<50 employees), Medium (50 to 1000 employees) and Big Enterprises (>1000 employees).
Brief History: In 2000, Altibase made its first commercial release, and acquired its first enterprise client i.e. Hyundai. Then, Altibase released its flagship product, Altibase HDB (Hybrid Database) in 2005. In 2017, Altibase developed and commercialized Sharding, and turned it into open-source in 2018.
Recommended Read => Best Database Management Software
Product Features
#1) IMDB (In-memory Database)
Altibase is an in-memory database with a high speed and user-friendly architecture. Particularly, it is very helpful to the use cases that demand high throughput and extremely low latency.
#2) Sharding
Sharding is a kind of database portioning that splits huge databases into smaller, faster, and more easily managed parts, known as shards.
Altibase offers unique and cutting-edge sharding in a manner that permits linear performance enhancement without coordinator-related bottlenecks. Thus, while scaling up, there is no performance degradation, regardless of the number of servers being added.
Altibase supports Server-side and Client-side sharding simultaneously to improve performance and compatibility.
#3) Deployment Flexibility
The flexible deployment mode offers three types i.e. In-memory only, On-disk, and Hybrid mode (memory & disk).
#4) Highly Available
Altibase supports highly partitioned tables that can transfer data from disk to memory tablespace and vice versa. It also has properties for specifying the size of character data.
Altibase also provides remote functions for batch processing. These functions can only be used within the stored procedures. Another good feature that ensures high availability is snapshot backup.
It also has a utility called JDBC adapter through which any changed data in Altibase can be applied to other JDBC-supported databases. It also offers a support buffer in which a certain number of x-logs are stored. This helps in minimizing the replication of data loss.
#5) Tools and Utilities
Altibase is functional and feature-rich by having all the tools and relational capabilities that are required by enterprise-grade applications. These tools and utilities comprise the major heads like Productivity & Administration, Interoperability & Migration, and others.
It supports all the functions like Multi-thread Process, LOB, Data Replication, Row-level Locking, Consistent View, DB Recovery, Table, Multi-key Index, Stored Procedure, Stored Function, Sequence, Queue Table, DB Audit, DB Link, Synonym, Table Portioning, User-defined Backup, Online Backup, Monitoring View.
#6) Platforms Supported
Altibase is a multi-platform and can be executed on nearly all enterprise OS and platforms.
#7) Interfaces
Supports ANSI SQL-92 and other SQL offered by the other DBMS as well. It is highly compatible with the standard interface.
#8) Programming Languages
In Altibase, multiple programming languages, like C, C+, Java, and all the languages that support ODBC and JDBC are supported.
Pricing
Altibase is free to use open-source DBMS. You can easily download it from the Altibase website.
A paid subscription is also offered to deliver professional support. The subscription fees are flexible and competitive. You can contact the vendor directly for a paid subscription.
Customer Support
Customer support is provided through training and support tickets. If any unexpected sudden failure occurs, then Remote Altibase DBAs can resolve the issue.
They also offer preventive health check services to confirm the maximum availability and performance of your Altibase implementation.
Advantages of Altibase Database
Take a look at the various advantages of Altibase below:
- Free to use.
- Lower maintenance costs.
- An open-source DBMS that offers cutting-edge sharding functionality.
- 100% free of IP infringement.
- Offers a rich and reliable feature suite.
- Easy SQL code and skills migration.
- Very flexible and user-friendly.
- High throughput ((100,000+ transactions per second) when compared with other disk-resident databases like Oracle.
- Low latency and efficient indexing.
- Predictable and low response times (microsecond scale).
- ACID – Compliant.
- ANSI SQL compliant.
- Cut down hardware and software costs as you get in-memory plus on-disk DBMS under one product.
- Being relational, ACID and SQL compliant, Altibase can substitute or work in conjunction with Oracle and other legacy databases.
- Migration of other legacy databases to Altibase is significantly less complicated. It also reduces DBA and implementation expenses.
Limitations
Though there are several pros of Altibase, there are certain limitations too.
They are as follows:
- Global indexes are not supported.
- Does not support servers or clients for Windows.
- The data transfer function of DataPort is not supported from the most recent version onwards.
- Currently, it does not have its own GUI management tool as Oracle has. However, you can use any third-party utility if you need GUI.
- Not ideal for data wares, but can be used for data marts.
- We do not support mobile access yet.
Altibase Integrations
Enlisted below is the list of tools that integrate with Altibase:
- Slick
- Redash
- Knex.js
- Backend
- Vertica
- QlikView
- Nette
Conclusion
Altibase is a high-performance, great hybrid RDBMS and is an enterprise-grade open source database that is free to use.
It has helped many clients to employ both disk and RAM as storage methods. It provides complete ACID compliance with an extensive feature set.
=> You can download this free open-source database from here and give it a try.
Feel free to share your experiences in the comments section below!!