The world's number two telecom RTOS vendor Enea has continued its adoption of Linux, adding a Linux port to the latest version of its real-time, fault-tolerant in-memory relational database management system (RDBMS). Polyhedra 5.1 also features an improved Java API. It targets data management applications such as process-control, telemetry, and remote monitoring, as well as telecommunications, data… communications, and server equipment.

Enea announced a broad strategy to embrace Linux in late April, when it launched a Linux interoperability layer for its OSE RTOS for telecom equipment, and began distributing Linux and Linux development tools. The largest telecom RTOS vendor, Wind River, began a similar strategic shift toward Linux in late 2003.

According to Enea, Polyhedra 5.1 couples the benefits of a SQL database with several unique features. For example, Polyhedra enables client applications to launch "active" queries that return ongoing, up-to-date results as live data change, resulting in a “fully current display of data as it is being generated and stored.” This feature makes Polyhedra useful in situations requiring alarm reporting or configuration change reporting, the company says.

Polyhedra can be configured as a fault-tolerant system with "master" and "standby" databases, with the master keeping the standby database up-to-date through direct message-passing. Client library code automatically handles failover, without any specific coding by the application developer, according to Enea. The client automatically reconnects to the new master database, re-establishes active queries, and gracefully handles queries and transactions that were in progress at the point of failover, the company says.

Polyhedra follows the client-server software architecture model, enforcing separation of applications from the data server to ensure they cannot bring each other down.

Polyhedra 5.1 brings fundamental performance enhancements, according to Enea. It features a small code-footprint and a memory-resident design that boosts performance by an order of magnitude, the company claims, relative to conventional disk-based RDBMSs, without sacrificing data security. Enea says the new version features a JDBC (Java database connectivity) driver yielding performance close to that which is available to C and C++ programmers using ODBC (open database connectivity).

Polyhedra supports a variety of compilers, including GCC, and in addition to Linux supports a large number of legacy embedded OSes and RTOSes.

Enea, with Polyhedra, was listed among third-tier embedded database providers in a 2003 survey report from analyst firm VDC.

"With the additional support for Linux, Enea Embedded Technology is emphasizing its strategy of extending Polyhedra's availability to a broad variety of operating systems in the embedded and server-level space,” said Product Manager Nigel Day.

Polyhedra 5.1 is available now, priced at $11,995 for a single development license. Time-limited, full-function evaluation versions for Linux and other platforms are available for download.

 
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.