Altibase Open Source Relational Database Review

This Tutorial Provides a Hands-on Review of the Altibase Database, Which is an Open-Source, ACID & SQL Compliant, 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, high-performance RDBMS.

Let’s Explore!!

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 and Seoul, South Korea.

Major Clients: Altibase has its customers in 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: It 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 as 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 highspeed 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 which 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

Its 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 be used only within the stored procedures. Another good feature which 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 amount of x-log is stored. This helps in minimizing the replication of data loss.

#5) Tools and Utilities

Altibase is function and feature-rich by having all the tools and relational capabilities that are required by the enterprise-grade applications. These tools and utilities comprise of 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, and 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 download it easily 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 solve the issues.

They also offer preventive health check services to confirm the maximum availability and performance of your Altibase implementation.

Advantages of Altibase Database

Let’s 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 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 the other disk-resident databases like Oracle.
• Low latency and efficient indexing.
• Predictable and low response times (microsecond scale).
• ACID-compliant.
• ANSI SQL compliant.
• Cuts down the hardware and software cost 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 from other legacy databases to Altibase is significantly less complicated. It also reduces the DBA and implementation expenses.

Limitations

Though there are several Pros of Altibase, there are certain limitations too.

They are:

• Global indexes are not supported.
• Does not support server and client for Window.
• The data transferring function of DataPort is not supported from the recent version onwards.
• Currently, it does not have its own GUI management tool like what 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.
• It does not support mobile access yet.

Altibase Integrations

Enlisted below is the list of the 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 try to share your experiences in the comments section below!!