It's Easy Going Green With Objectivity/DB

IT departments are very aware of the need to save energy, colloquially labeled "going green". We can all do our bit to help by taking a few simple steps, such as changing the energy saving settings on our computers at work and home. I've recently started moving my personal web sites to a "green" web host provider. They guarantee that 100% of the energy they use in their data center comes from renewable resources. Objectivity's headquarters had a smart energy control system to reduce our overall energy consumption. Whether or not you believe in "saving the planet", it makes sense to save money.

If you're an Objectivity/DB user you're implicitly saving energy. When we benchmarked Objectivity/DB against RDBMSs a couple of years ago we needed one quarter of the processor power and 60% less storage than our competitors. Not all applications will show such a large saving, but there is always a CPU saving due to the lack of a mapping layer and a disk storage saving because of the lack of join tables and unnecessary indices. That can translate to better performance and greater throughput. It can also mean running fewer processors to achieve a task.

Objectivity/DB associations (called "relationships" in Java and C#) can take between 8 and 24 bytes per bi-directional link. In-line links can be 4 bytes to other objects within a container and 8 bytes for connections that span containers or databases. Dynamic links are always 12 bytes. Associations are extremely efficient relative to stored join tables and their accompanying B-Tree indices. Scalable collections also use less disk space than their relational equivalents. The more complex the application and data, the greater the saving.

You'll also be saving energy if it takes you less time to accomplish a development or administration task. Just remember to go home early and turn off the lights. Good luck on the going home early part! :-)