FairCom DB upgrade results in increased database performance

Part 1: SQL
Part 2: Reliability
Part 3: Performance
Part 4: Security
Part 5: Support

Don’t miss out! Benefits abound with easy FairCom DB upgrade

Latest version provides users with faster performance and valuable new features

Note: c-treeACE became FairCom DB in 2020.

Note: This is the third piece in a series about the benefits of upgrading from a legacy version of c-tree to a current version.

What is the definition of database performance? … It depends on who is answering the question. For some people, it is fast inserts. For others, it is fast indexing. Then there are some who want fast searches or fast, efficient application operations, and so forth.

While there is no clear, concise definition for database performance, FairCom DB provides high performance in multiple areas. … These features allow you to experience performance gains in a wide range of areas due to the on-going enhancements to our product. However, unless you upgrade from an old version of c-tree (which includes c-tree Plus), you will miss out on enhanced performance benefits of a current version of the FairCom DB unified multimodel database.

By upgrading to a current version of FairCom DB, you can leverage FairCom’s new Multi-threaded Server Engine with programmer-tunable record-level locks and data caching. This allows FairCom DB to support hundreds of concurrent user connections with high performance. As unlikely as this sounds, it is easy for your application to connect to our database server instead of compiling or linking our database into your application. The result is faster running applications and enhanced scaling.    

Users of the current version of FairCom DB can capitalize on the FairCom c-tree Client Library’s automatic use of the fastest protocol to communicate with databases. This feature allows connections to databases to occur on the same server using fast shared memory and to databases on remote servers using TCP/IP. The result of this performance benefit is that you can run the database on the same server or on a remote server with NO CHANGE to your application.

One of the biggest obstacles to achieving a high level of database performance is data input/output. A current of version of FairCom DB provides you with the Data Compression feature. The major benefit is the compression greatly reduces input/output with little-to-no cost to CPU performance. It allows you to compress all data and reduce storage costs. Another important data storage performance feature is the Granular Cache Control, which enables users to control which data is cached, and it prevents scans of all data in a table from wiping out previously cached data.

Two popular features among V11.5 users are Delayed Durability for table writes and Deferred Index for delaying writes to indexes. With these database configuration options, your application can run dramatically faster without any changes to code. 

• Delayed Durability: Allows the operating system to cache all writes to disk. This slightly increases the risk of losing data because the OS caches the data before it writes data to disk in bigger chunks, but it greatly increases the insert and update performance of the database.
• Deferred Index: Allows inserts, updates, and deletes to occur immediately while gradually adding these changes to one or more indexes asynchronously. This greatly speeds inserts at the cost of having indexes contain slightly out-of-date data.

If you want to execute queries, inserts, updates and deletes at extreme speeds, the FairCom DB In-memory Tables feature is available. Tables run only in memory, enabling it to be optimized for running in RAM. You can also use the FairCom Data Filters, which allow applications using ISAM to tell the database server to batch process a set of records and return the results. Because this batch process runs on the server, it can return results much faster. 

Two other capabilities that you will have access to when upgrading to the current version of FairCom DB are:

• System Monitoring – Makes it easy for you to monitor and tune every aspect of the database.
• Fast Processing of the fixed part of a variable-length records – Allows you to use the slightly slower variable-length files with the performance of fixed length files.

Customers upgrading to V11.5 often achieve instant performance gains of up to 3X.

If you want to learn how easy it is to upgrade from a legacy version of FairCom DB to a current version, please contact us at 1-800-234-8180 or click here for additional contact information.