The Embedded Business Group of Hitachi America has released an English language beta of its small-footprint relational database management system (RDBMS). Entier supports Linux, among other embedded OSes, and can be configured to a 300 KB memory footprint, making it one of the most compact RDBMSs available, according to the company.

Hitachi says it has been marketing Entier in Japan for about a year and it is under active evaluation by manufacturers of smartphones, set-top boxes, digital video recorders, and navigation systems. The English language version is expected to achieve a production release in September.

While other RDBMSs are limited to searching only alphanumeric data, Entier offers two new powerful search technologies, according to Hitachi.

It has the ability to search 3-D data efficiently, making it well suited to navigation devices or for delivering location-based services to a variety of mobile devices.

Entier also supports incremental text search. As users enter letters into a search window, Entier progressively executes the search, narrowing down the results with each keystroke. Hitachi says this is useful for any application that involves searching for entries by name, such as looking up numbers in a user's phonebook, or entering text into a kiosk as part of a search for resources.

Entier architecture
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Use of Entier is expected to “significantly speed time to market and reduce development costs for applications running on small devices,” according to the company.

Malcom Colton, VP of sales and marketing for Hitachi's embedded group, stated, “We have built high-performance spatial search into Entier, so that it can rapidly answer questions like 'Show me nearby hotels or restaurants' or 'Show me the points of interest along this route.' We expect to see Entier deployed on mobile devices to support queries against location-based data cached in the device.”

Hitachi says it will offer a Software Developer's Kit running on Microsoft Windows, as well as royalty-based run time licensing for the product on a variety of platforms used in small footprint devices. According to the product's data sheet, supported target systems include: Linux, VxWorks, Symbian, Windows CE, Windows Mobile, and T-Kernel.

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