VistaDB 6 Beta 2 Available
VistaDB 6 Beta 2 is now available for download.
This beta includes all the enhancements we’ve announced plus VS 2019 support. We’re
publishing this beta to get final feedback on any problems developers run into when upgrading their applications for 6.0
and any issues they identify which we haven’t found in our testing.
If you’re not familiar with the improvements coming with VistaDB 6, check out the following blog articles:
And new with Beta 2:
Faster Low-Level Storage
The big change in Beta 2 is a rewritten lower-level storage engine that is designed to allocate a lot fewer objects when walking through tables, particularly tables that have a large number of columns. While creating objects is very fast in .NET when you create too many of them the runtime has to work hard to clean them up as you go. VistaDB 6 dramatically reduces the number of objects created per-row which pays off when you have multiple threads querying large tables at the same time in your application.
The best part is it improves the performance not just of VistaDB but of your application as a whole - because the garbage collector (GC) is a shared resources and when it has to stop and free up memory it stops everything.
Real Async Support
VistaDB will now use a separate worker thread to execute queries when being used with async/ await so even if the query is issued on the UI thread the UI will remain responsive. The coverage isn’t complete - updates and deletes run on the main thread and we have limited cancellation support but we’ve hit major cases application commonly need. If we’ve missed an async scenario you have please let us know!
Try the new Single Process Modes
We’ve introduced new open modes for VistaDB databases that significantly improve the performance for applications where only a single process will have a database open at a time. We know this applies to many if not most applications using VistaDB and pays particular dividends for mobile applications.
All you have to do is change your open mode from a nonexclusive mode to the equivalent Single Process mode and you’ll get the performance benefits we detailed in VistaDB 6 Introduces Faster Single Application Locks.
What Feedback are we Looking For
We’re really interested in any regressions in performance or functionality. For example, where VistaDB 5.* is faster at an operation than this beta or where a query works differently. We have test suites we run every release through that we upgrade and extend with every release and this is no different so we don’t expect any new problems to show up but we know our customers often have found very creative ways to use VistaDB and we want to be sure everything works right on day one for the final release.
Roadmap to Release
This is our last planned public build before release - we expect to ship VistaDB 6 within 10 days, as soon as we can validate one last new feature: .NET Core and .NET Standard support!