The computing needs of large organizations are well served by today's high-end database technology. However, small- to medium-sized businesses and individual departments within large companies require a low-cost database that is easy to install, use, and maintain. Pervasive Software's Pervasive.SQL 2000i is a midtier database that caters to the need of this growing segment of users. It offers an overall low cost of ownership and near-lights-out administration. The product's predecessor, Btrieve, has been used as an embedded database in thousands of applications. Over the years, it has earned a reputation of performing reliably even without the expertise of a database administrator. Pervasive.SQL 2000i combines the transactional throughput and reliability of Btrieve with the power and flexibility of a RDBMS.

BEST OF BOTH WORLDS

In the database market, Pervasive competes with enterprise-class database vendors such as Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and Sybase. However, Pervasive.SQL 2000i is targeted toward the lower-end IT users, who generally find the high-end databases too expensive to deploy and administer. Pervasive's advantage is that its solution has a lower total cost of ownership and it can be maintained without the services of an experienced DBA.

On the other hand, Pervasive compares well with midtier databases such as Microsoft's FoxPro and Access, dBase Inc.'s dBase, MySQL, and PostgreSQL, as it offers many of the features traditionally found in enterprise-class databases. These features include cross-platform support, scalability to thousands of users, robust backup and recovery procedures, a sophisticated optimizer, and multiple application interfaces. The most unique feature of Pervasive.SQL 2000i is undoubtedly its ability to provide both transactional and relational data access methods.

UNITY IN DIVERSITY

Pervasive.SQL 2000i ships in three versions. The Workstation edition is a single-user, desktop version, which you can use for development and testing. The Workgroup edition can be deployed without a network server and can cater to the needs of up to 10 users. The Server edition is for high-volume environments that require the power of a true client/server solution. It includes a client component that is installed on each user's workstation. Applications that run on the workstation use the client component to connect to the server. The product scales from one version to the next easily, as the same set of code works on all editions. The remainder of this review focuses on the Server edition.

Pervasive.SQL 2000i supports multiple platforms, such as Novell, NT, Solaris, and Linux. Because the database files on each operating system are all binary-compatible, you could simply copy the files while porting from one platform to another.

Pervasive.SQL 2000i provides applications with both transactional and relational access to the database. It uses the Btrieve API to provide transactional access. The Btrieve API is a low-level API that interacts directly with the database engine. The transactional data access method provides the fastest, most direct path to data. This approach is ideal for high-volume transactions in which the speed of individual I/O operations is of the utmost importance. Pervasive provides relational access through SQL. Thus, the same application can use high-speed transactional access to insert data and use the more flexible relational approach to formulate complex queries.

THE RIGHT CONNECTIONS

Database connectivity has long been the Achilles' heel of application development. Pervasive provides a number of interfaces for applications to connect to the database. These interfaces include ODBC, JDBC, Java Classes, ActiveX Data Object (ADO), OLE/DB, ActiveX Controls, Pervasive Direct Access Components (PDAC), Btrieve, and a Distributed Tuning Interface (DTI).

ODBC connectivity has traditionally been slower because most ODBC interfaces are built as an add-on layer to a proprietary relational API. Pervasive.SQL 2000i addresses this issue by implementing a fully integrated ODBC interface at the client level as well as at the server level. Applications developed to this interface can directly access the database engine without going through additional layers.

Pervasive.SQL 2000i offers Java programmers the relational JDBC interface as well as the transactional Java Class interface. Pervasive's JDBC driver is Pure Java, which means that applications using this interface can run on any platform that supports the Java Virtual Machine and version 1.1 of the Java Development Kit. Java Class Libraries are a collection of Java classes that give Java programmers access to the high-performance Btrieve API.

PDAC provides both relational and transactional access from Borland development environments such as Delphi and C++ Builder.

The DTI API provides developers with low-level database engine functions, letting them configure, monitor, and manage the database from within their applications. In essence, DTI lets developers use application calls to tune the database when the application is running. This feature goes a long way in supporting Pervasive's vision of low-cost database maintenance without the services of a full-time DBA.

HANDS-FREE ADMINISTRATION

Pervasive.SQL 2000i has several other features designed with maintenance-free operations in mind. These features include continuous operations during backup to ensure the database is always available, archival logging with roll-forward capabilities, transaction logging, dynamic caching, dynamic file allocation, index balancing, and a new cost-based optimizer for automatic tuning.