Gibraltar VistaDB v6.0.10
Gibraltar VistaDb 6.0.10
Microsoft has worked hard to make .NET and SQL Server a powerful combination - and VistaDB brings that capability to a small, easy to deploy package. Think of all the things built on top of ADO.NET - not just your application but reporting systems, ORMs, and other data-driven libraries for .NET. You can use all of these in your application with our easy to deploy, cross-platform database engine.
Thanks to ADO.NET's provider model, you can even have one application easily support Microsoft SQL Server and VistaDB with just a change in a connection string! Perfect for scale-down scenarios like stand alone deployments and demo versions.
Easy to Deploy
The VistaDB engine is a single, small managed assembly you deploy with your app and each database is a single file. Using Xamarin, you can fit a full RDBMS on your phone!
Easy to Program
VistaDB is a fully compliant ADO.NET data provider with support for Entity Framework, ADO.NET, and Typed Datasets as well as its own Direct Data Access API for efficient cursor-based operations. Thanks to ADO.NET, VistaDB is already compatible with a wide range of third party ORMs, reporting systems and more!
Easy to Upscale
VistaDB fully supports the ADO.NET Provider Factory model allowing you write one codebase that can target either VistaDB or SQL Server at runtime.
VistaDB consists of a redistributable database engine, Visual Studio integration, tools for data management, documentation, sample code and our fanatical technical support. In addition, VistaDB works with various ORMs and other third party tools.
Visual Studio Integration Features in VistaDB
VistaDB Server ExplorerThe VistaDB Designer for Visual Studio extends the Server Explorer with a complete interface for developing VistaDB databases including schema design, modeling, editing, and data manipulation. This works just like it does for Microsoft SQL Server, including visual query creation inside the Visual Studio IDE.
Of course, you can always use Data Builder outside of Visual Studio for VistaDB database development but it’s great to have everything you might need available within your IDE.
Entity Framework
The VistaDB Entity Framework provider supports Entity Framework 6 as well as EF5 and EF4. You can generate EF models with Visual Studio using the Database-First approach where you create the VistaDB database using your preferred approach and then import that database into your Entity Model. Then, using your preferred EF code syntax you can query and modify data. For more information see the power of VistaDB’s support for Entity Framework.
ADO.NET Support (Of Course!)
VistaDB is also a fully compliant ADO.NET provider factory that supports .Net 4.5.1 and later.
Full support for ADO.NET Provider Factories also means you can write generic data access code and change the connection string to load VistaDB or SQL Server at runtime for a single application build that supports multiple backend data stores.
What is Entity Framework?
Entity Framework (EF) is an object-relational mapper (ORM) that eliminates the need for most data-access code that developers usually need to write. It ships with .NET 4.0 and later and is Microsoft’s preferred data access strategy for most applications.
With EF you create a .NET object model that reflects how your database tables should be accessed within your application. Entity Framework automatically generates the data access code to go to and from your database so you don’t have to write either T-SQL code or laborious column-by-column parameter or data mappings.
EF Makes Data Access Easy
Entity Framework can automatically generate all of the basic insert, update, and delete actions for your application but the real power is the ability to use LINQ to create complex queries, with full intellisense support, right in Visual Studio.
Use VistaDB with EF for Rapid Application Development
VistaDB comes with providers for EF 4-6. You can design your database using VistaDB’s tools and then automatically generate or update an entity model within your application. Using the EF EDMX designer you can clean up property and relationship names, map stored procedures and views, and tune the entity model.
Other features
Visual Studio Integration
VistaDB integrates tightly with Microsoft Visual Studio 2019, 2017, and 2015 so you can create databases and alter their schema, indexes and more directly inside Visual Studio.
Mobile Support
Use the same powerful engine anywhere you use .NET - for Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, and Macintosh. VistaDB fully supports Xamarin making it the only option for T-SQL support on mobile phones and tablets.
VistaDB Database Engine
No SQL database is easier to deploy than VistaDB. With just a single, fully .NET assembly to add to your application there's nothing to install, nothing that requires elevated privileges or additional dependencies. Each database is a single file with your full schema and data. Backup and restore is as easy as copying files.
Data Builder
Data Builder is a powerful yet easy-to-use application that lets you visually create and manage VistaDB databases.
Data Migration
The Data Migration Wizard makes it easy to migrate existing schema and data from SQL Server, SQL Server CE, or Microsoft Access (MDB and ACCDB) to VistaDB's database format.
What is Entity Framework?
Entity Framework (EF) is an object-relational mapper (ORM) that eliminates the need for most data-access code that developers usually need to write. It ships with .NET 4.0 and later and is Microsoft’s preferred data access strategy for most applications.
With EF you create a .NET object model that reflects how your database tables should be accessed within your application. Entity Framework automatically generates the data access code to go to and from your database so you don’t have to write either T-SQL code or laborious column-by-column parameter or data mappings.
EF Makes Data Access Easy
Entity Framework can automatically generate all of the basic insert, update, and delete actions for your application but the real power is the ability to use LINQ to create complex queries, with full intellisense support, right in Visual Studio.
Use VistaDB with EF for Rapid Application Development
VistaDB comes with providers for EF 4-6. You can design your database using VistaDB’s tools and then automatically generate or update an entity model within your application. Using the EF EDMX designer you can clean up property and relationship names, map stored procedures and views, and tune the entity model.
One Database, Many Platforms
With VistaDB you can deploy the same database and codebase to Windows, Linux, Macintosh, iOS and Android phones and tablets using .NET and Xamarin. VistaDB was designed to "scale down", making it a great choice for places where resources are tight - like phones and tablets. Being pure managed code you don't have to worry about compiling for different architectures or chipsets.
All The Database You Expect
Even though VistaDB is small enough to fit on your mobile device it doesn't skimp on database features. You still get T-SQL support, a rich relational database schema with indexes and constraints, and stored procedures - just like you'd have on SQL Server.
VistaDB: Easy-to-Deploy, SQL-Compatible, Pure .NET
The VistaDB Engine is a small, fully managed assembly you deploy with your applications that delivers a full database in a serverless design. It efficiently processes SQL commands and performs low-level reading and writing of data in VistaDB databases with everything stored as a single file for easy distribution of data.
Deploying VistaDB with your application is simple - just add a reference to the DLL and let it be copied out with your other dependencies. No configuration or elevated privileges are required on the target system. There's no licensing complexity either - Every VistaDB purchase includes unlimited royalty-free distribution.
Full Featured Embedded Data Storage
Before anything else, VistaDB is designed as a safe, secure place to keep your essential application data.
Multi-User, Multi-Threaded - A single VistaDB database supports simultaneous read & write transactions from multiple processes simultaneously. Multiple connection modes are supported to let VistaDB optimize performance for your scenario.
FIPS-Compliant AES Encryption - Encrypt both data and code in VistaDB where only your application knows the decryption key. Use this to safeguard data at rest and keep control over valuable data sets.
Row and Table Locking - Safely update and insert data with locks ensuring that changes are immediately visible to other connections without the delay of eventual consistency models.
Built-in Diagnostics and Repair - Record runtime performance and tracing information to your own logging system to help support VistaDB in the field along with built-in features for optimizing databases and repairing corruption caused by storage problems or crashes.
Easy to Deploy
The VistaDB engine is a single, small managed assembly you deploy with your app and each database is a single file. No hassles with different versions for x86 versus x64. No COM objects to register. No installer to run. No database server to administer. Just xcopy and go!
Easy to Program
VistaDB is a fully compliant ADO.NET data provider with support for Entity Framework, ADO.NET, and Typed Datasets as well as its own Direct Data Access API for efficient cursor-based operations. VistaDB offers impressive compatibility with T-SQL including stored procedures, updatable views, cascading updates / deletes, table value params, CLR Triggers and CLR stored procs.
Easy to Upscale
VistaDB fully supports the ADO.NET Provider Factory model allowing you write one codebase that can target either VistaDB or SQL Server at runtime. Use VistaDB for the "lite" version of your application in which size and easy of deployment are paramount. And when greater scalability is required, upscale to SQL Server with no code changes.
VistaDB 6 is focused on improving the performance and usability of VistaDB through changes to the low-level engine. These improvements will help out mobile and desktop apps but we looked in particular at the challenges of mobile development to identify the most important items for us to focus on.
When you take all of the changes we’ve put in to VistaDB 6 together we’ve cut execution time by nearly 40% for some common query patterns.
Asynchronous Database Operations
VistaDB 6 will natively support async/await asynchronous database operations, making it much easier to create responsive UI applications that interact with databases. Instead of writing your own code to put operations that could block on a background thread so your UI stays responsive you can just await the call to VistaDB. While the engine is working on your request your thread can go back to other UI actions.
As an embedded database, VistaDB is usually processor bound. To make async operations effective we’ve pushed all the hard work the engine does off to a background thread (and more, see below).
For more details, see Async / Await Support.
Multithreaded Query Processing
The VistaDB engine is being updated to use multiple threads to process queries where the overall query can be broken into multiple stages that can be processed independently. For example, subqueries will be run on their own threads and then merged with the outer query to significantly improve subquery performance. Even queries that don’t break down into stages will be run on a separate query from the calling application to support async processing and enable a modest amount of concurrent work with Data Readers and ORM’s.
We’re incorporating a new query governor to make sure the engine won’t use too many threads and overwhelm systems with few cores or a large number of concurrent operations in the same process.
Better Throughput and Scalability with Multiple Simultaneous Queries
We’ve changed the core implementation of VistaDB to significantly reduce the number of objects created (and destroyed) when doing large queries over a large number of rows. Previously, these ‘firehose’ queries tended to tax the .NET garbage collector, leading to performance falloff if two or more were run concurrently that effectively wiped out the advantage of running parallel queries.
With the new approach several firehose queries (up to the number of cores available) can be run at the same time producing a higher number of total rows per second retrieved. This change and our new locking improvements later in the post are the “scalability” changes to VistaDB - aimed at improving the common scenarios of multiple operations happening at the same time. The exact improvement depends on the number of columns in the table(s) involved in the queries and some other factors but it’s a notable improvement from prior versions.
For more details, see Faster Low-Level Storage
Faster Locks for Single Application Usage
Previously, VistaDB used file locks when running in any mode that allowed multiple writers. For version 6 VistaDB will use in-memory locks whenever possible and fall back to file locks only when multiple processes are accessing the same database (and can modify it). This is dramatically faster and will narrow the performance gap between exclusive mode and non-exclusive read/write mode, particularly for the very common scenario of a single process accessing a database.
VistaDB will automatically detect if a second process is attempting to access the same database and switch back to file system locks if required, so this feature doesn’t require any changes to the application.
For more details, see Faster Single Application Locks.
.NET Core and .NET Standard Support
In addition to the .NET Framework-optimized VistaDB Engine, a new common .NET Standard implementation will ship in the box to replace the previous platform-specific Xamarin builds (for iOS, Android, and Mac) as well as support .NET Core. Library developers that want to support the whole range of .NET applications can target the .NET Standard 2.0 implementation of VistaDB and truly have one build for everywhere!
Availability
We’re working hard to ship VistaDB 6 as soon as feasible - but not until we’re sure we’ve hit the performance and feature goals above and the engine has demonstrated it’s up to the same reliability standard as VistaDB 5. This has already taken longer than we’ve intended, so if you have active Upgrade Assurance for VistaDB you’ll be receiving a special thank you gift from us, a sign of our appreciation for your ongoing support.
When you take all of the changes we’ve put in to VistaDB 6 together we’ve cut execution time by nearly 40% for some common query patterns.
Asynchronous Database Operations
VistaDB 6 will natively support async/await asynchronous database operations, making it much easier to create responsive UI applications that interact with databases. Instead of writing your own code to put operations that could block on a background thread so your UI stays responsive you can just await the call to VistaDB. While the engine is working on your request your thread can go back to other UI actions.
As an embedded database, VistaDB is usually processor bound. To make async operations effective we’ve pushed all the hard work the engine does off to a background thread (and more, see below).
For more details, see Async / Await Support.
Multithreaded Query Processing
The VistaDB engine is being updated to use multiple threads to process queries where the overall query can be broken into multiple stages that can be processed independently. For example, subqueries will be run on their own threads and then merged with the outer query to significantly improve subquery performance. Even queries that don’t break down into stages will be run on a separate query from the calling application to support async processing and enable a modest amount of concurrent work with Data Readers and ORM’s.
We’re incorporating a new query governor to make sure the engine won’t use too many threads and overwhelm systems with few cores or a large number of concurrent operations in the same process.
Better Throughput and Scalability with Multiple Simultaneous Queries
We’ve changed the core implementation of VistaDB to significantly reduce the number of objects created (and destroyed) when doing large queries over a large number of rows. Previously, these ‘firehose’ queries tended to tax the .NET garbage collector, leading to performance falloff if two or more were run concurrently that effectively wiped out the advantage of running parallel queries.
With the new approach several firehose queries (up to the number of cores available) can be run at the same time producing a higher number of total rows per second retrieved. This change and our new locking improvements later in the post are the “scalability” changes to VistaDB - aimed at improving the common scenarios of multiple operations happening at the same time. The exact improvement depends on the number of columns in the table(s) involved in the queries and some other factors but it’s a notable improvement from prior versions.
For more details, see Faster Low-Level Storage
Faster Locks for Single Application Usage
Previously, VistaDB used file locks when running in any mode that allowed multiple writers. For version 6 VistaDB will use in-memory locks whenever possible and fall back to file locks only when multiple processes are accessing the same database (and can modify it). This is dramatically faster and will narrow the performance gap between exclusive mode and non-exclusive read/write mode, particularly for the very common scenario of a single process accessing a database.
VistaDB will automatically detect if a second process is attempting to access the same database and switch back to file system locks if required, so this feature doesn’t require any changes to the application.
For more details, see Faster Single Application Locks.
.NET Core and .NET Standard Support
In addition to the .NET Framework-optimized VistaDB Engine, a new common .NET Standard implementation will ship in the box to replace the previous platform-specific Xamarin builds (for iOS, Android, and Mac) as well as support .NET Core. Library developers that want to support the whole range of .NET applications can target the .NET Standard 2.0 implementation of VistaDB and truly have one build for everywhere!
Availability
We’re working hard to ship VistaDB 6 as soon as feasible - but not until we’re sure we’ve hit the performance and feature goals above and the engine has demonstrated it’s up to the same reliability standard as VistaDB 5. This has already taken longer than we’ve intended, so if you have active Upgrade Assurance for VistaDB you’ll be receiving a special thank you gift from us, a sign of our appreciation for your ongoing support.