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Statement about Dataphor to the development community from Alphora

Dataphor provides:

• Dataphor is a complete development environment with a client, server, middle-tier, programming language, query language, IDE, storage abstraction layer, user-interface toolkit, system libraries, device interfaces...
• Dataphor can access Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, Postgres, MySQL and any other storage engine with a single unified language.
• Dataphor can almost build your entire user-interface.
• Dataphor supports user-interfaces for Windows desktop and Web - with little effort it could be Flash, Silverlight, Macintosh OS X, WPF, Gnome, KDE, X11, libterm.
• Dataphor has a clean concise programming language (D4).
• Dataphor is open-source - because sometimes documentation is not enough.
• Dataphor is open-source - because sometimes we can't fix every bug.
• Dataphor is open-source - because sometimes we can't think or do everything.

Dataphor is useful:

• Dataphor is being used to run several production systems successfully now (with dozens of concurrent users).
• Dataphor helps us to build more complex applications with less code that is more readable.
• We bury SQL several levels down, the D4 language is much easier to learn and use than SQL.
• Dataphor is a fast way to build applications because there is less glue, plumbing and repetitive code involved.
• We built Dataphor to make application development easier and more reliable, that remains our goal.

Dataphor is perfect, but:

• Our solution to application transactions still needs more work to be more general.
• Memory management using generational GC in a virtual memory environment is not ideal.
• The Dataphor user interface requires a paradigm shift and can be somewhat baffling, we aim to simplify the model.
• Under load Dataphor can place stress on memory management, we aim to improve this aspect.
• We would like to remove dependencies on closed third-party components in the IDE.
• Some parts of the codebase are not as well written as we would like.
• Some parts of the documentation are not as clear as we would like, or as complete.
• Dataphor has been in development for over 8 years and we have changed our thinking about the best way to approach some problems.
• Dataphor requires some effort to learn, it could be much easier.

Quick facts about Dataphor:

• Dataphor is a virtual DBMS in the sense that it uses other DBMS to provide storage management.
• Dataphor is a stand-alone DBMS since it has a crude storage engine.
• Dataphor aspires to draw on the ideas articulated comprehensively and tenaciously by C.J. Date & Hugh Darwen, but Dataphor allows nulls, doesn't have specialization by constraint or a few other essentials.
• Dataphor's programming and query language is known as D4.
• Dataphor is written entirely in C# and D4, though Dataphor can "speak" other DBMS specific SQL dialects (TSQL, PL/SQL etc).
• Dataphor is built on Microsoft's NET Framework, but the abstractions support portability to other platforms.
• Dataphor codebase is built and managed using Visual Studio 2008. (But you should also be able to do it with SharpDevelop)
• Dataphor could be ported to Mono/MonoDevelop on Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris and Windows.
• Dataphor has a Windows Forms desktop client.
• Dataphor has a basic Web client.
• Dataphor's application transactions provide a solution to optimistic-locking challenge for CRUD based user interfaces.
• Dataphor's "browse" cursors allow performant paging and searching of large result sets without writing code.

Alphora currently is:

Dataphor in the past has had developer contributions from:

Dataphor has also benefited from non-developer contributions from:

See Also

• About Dataphor