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Future Plans

Just wondering what is the future plans for VistaDB?

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We have several things on our roadmap, the sequencing of them will depend on customer requests and whether or not we run into unexpected issues.


  • Xamarin Support:  We have been steadily working on shipping support for using VistaDB with iOS and Android devices.  We do have customers doing this in a preview mode but are waiting on improvements from Microsoft before we can make this easy enough to do to meet our goals (currently you have to compile VistaDB from source for the target platform to get it to work reliably on iOS and Android which we don't consider reasonable)
  • New Data Builder:  We shelved for 5.0 a completely rebuilt Data Builder application that you can ship with your application for use in the field, supporting a friendlier UI and asynchronous operation.  This has been revived and we're working on it for a future update to 5 or for VistaDB 6.
  • Entity Framework Core:  (Formerly Entity Framework 7).  This uses a completely new provider model and is relatively immature compared to EF 6.  We hope to ship a new EF Core provider (that will still require the full .NET framework, not .NET Core) as an update for version 5.
  • Big Performance Improvement:  During development of version 5 we identified a fundamental design choice made back when VistaDB was first written that significantly reduces scalability when performing multiple queries in the same process at the same time.  We have a strategy to redo the low-level VistaDB implementation to address this and possibly gain a significant amount of performance, particularly in operations that are slow today.

In addition to the above we're always implementing incremental improvements to our TSQL dialect, particularly based on user requests.

If there's something you particularly want we didn't cover, please let us know because user requests are the primary way we determine what to  work on next.

Speed is my concern on shared database on multiple computers. I really like to see the Performance improvements and XaMarin

That is probably one of the toughest areas for us to make real improvements without writing a completely different VistaDB that's an actual server.  The core problem we face is providing a reliable, consistent database through SMB File sharing.  Put simply, networks are just too slow at that tier of an application.  We've looked a few times at a server version of VistaDB but were cautioned each time we did an analysis that there likely isn't sufficient market to justify the engineering and maintenance costs of such a product.  But, we're willing to be proved wrong on that point!

+1 for Xamarin support! This would be HUGE as it would now mean we have an SQL Server equivalent on mobile!


Just out of curiousity - what is it about Xamarin that requires VistaDB to be compiled from source? And if customers can compile from source and use it, why can't you compile it and give us binaries?


Would love to help in any way I can (even beta testing), since this would save me MONTHS of work (I was about to implement my own database engine for mobile).

Xamarin doesn't support MSIL AnyCPU assemblies for use on iOS and Android - it's more that you can reuse your C# code because it had to produce native byte code for mobile platforms. It's an odd scenario where it kinda all appears to work but then fails at runtime with crashes and other bad outcomes. At worst we should be able to make a series of binaries, one for each platform.

Thanks for the clarification. If making a series of binaries is a matter of you changing some build settings then compiling (i.e. no need to change the code), then please do. Given the choice of No VistaDB at all or choose binary depending on platform I think the latter is better (I imagine a mobile app could download the version it needs once it has figured out the platform it is running on).


Hope we can get some binaries to try out soon!

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Following up on this - work is proceeding with Xamarin support.  We're going down the route of producing a different assembly for each platform which appears to be the best approach.  We currently have an iOS assembly that is passing all but a few unit tests, one of which may ultimately reflect a limitation of running on Unix.


If you're keen on trying out iOS please reach out to support and we can send you a binary to try.  Meanwhile, we're going to turn our attention to Android.

Will Vistadb Xamarin support OS X

Thanks

We're expecting to have that as well.  Any customer that's keen on giving it a try should contact Support for a preview version.

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