River Software Technologies SAS

Stretching Relational Databases Towards the Limits of NoSQL and Schema-Free

Today’s business needs are pushing the boundaries for database manipulation, in a way that IT divisions cannot cope with the fact of the many changes in the database structures. What to do then? Move to new fascinating technologies? Cassandra? MongoDB? Illuminate? Hadoop? Or just rely on the current infrastructure and know-how? StretchDB™ is here as a concept to bridge that gap.

Nowadays industries and standards on data storage and manipulation, strives towards and elastic mode of growing databases and its containing schemas, being able to adapt without having to shake the whole application, requiring costly adaptations to the new model. For this the NoSQL databases and Schema-Free are becoming the standard in the industry, databases like Casandra, MongoDB, Hadoop, HBase among others are gaining momentum.

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The idea behind StretchDB® is to use existent know-how and technology to broaden the scope of traditional-relational way of thinking.

Modern Traditional Relational Databases

Just One Single Table!
Must have support for XML types.
Must support strong XPATH functions for retrieving data
Ideally must support Function Based Indexes based on XPATH

Strong API Handling / Administration (StretchDB™)

Build all in JAVA, Plain Old Java Objects (POJO) based solution
Build on top of riverSDK® open source framework
Web User Interface Plugins (WUIP) based on riverPortals™

Traditional Know-How Exploited to the Max!

Standard SQL Statements combined with XPATH functions
Standard JAVA Programming
XML Manipulation through marshalling and un-marshalling.

StretchDB™ is not a technology by itself, but rather a framework that runs on top of proven technology, therefore all the burden of performance lies on the database of choice and its support for manipulating XML, and mostly its management for large sets of XML chunks.

Most of the time, it is either an administrator or a data-entry end user, which interacts with riverPortals® and the StretchDB™ Web User Interface POJO (WUIP) bundle, either to create or modify existing data structures, as well as entering data.

At the end, it’s again the StretchDB™ API in charge to communicate all the changes to the RDBMS where the underlying table structure is located into.

What you end up knowing? From the API standpoint, just a Table that has Column Schema, and a collection of Rows containing Row objects, which at the end contains a collection of Columns, composed of Column objects.

Very much like when you manipulate tables in HTML but additionally having a full blown up schema for you to benefit from.

Automatic formulary creation by StretchDB™ Formulary Rendering Engine to be used by riverPortals™

StretchDB™ management console is deployed on riverPortals™ as a WUIP bundle, nevertheless, if someone doesn’t have this facility, or do not want to use riverPortals™, it can always be used the underlying XML configuration files to create all what is required, and since this is an open source project, it can always be customized to be accommodated to any other platform.

Completely integrated with riverPortals™ as a UI-POJO bundle.

Ability to create POJO based controllers for each schema, called TableHandlers, in order to control how the data is stored in the RDBMS. One can thing of them as being triggers at the table level.

Ability to create EDA rules, stored as JSON, at the column level to control how StretchDB™ Formulary rendering engine creates the user form, in a way of “When-this-Then-That”.