Scalability

Let's face it; you don't always know where your customers will come from in the future.  What if you built a system for large companies and now suddenly you see a huge market for the small or home office?  If you require a large server for deployment the cost of the dedicated server and server software may price you out of the market.  VistaDB is about providing you choices in how and where you deploy your software.

Deployment options

Read only - Ever needed to query a backup of a database without restoring it first?  VistaDB can query data from read only media (like DVD or CD ROM).  Catalogs sent to customers on CD, backups with built in query engines, ad hoc query support for legal or offsite personnel are all possible with VistaDB. Isolated storage is not very big now.  But what if your users have a large active directory with mobile users?  If you cached your data into isolated storage they would have their data with their roaming profiles as they moved.  No installation on the runtime machine.  No registry access required - VistaDB can even run as guest.  This will be an even bigger deal in the future as more click-once and zero touch deployment options are made available.

Single user, multi user, LAN, UNC

Can your database do all that now (SQL CE Cannot)?  It can if you use VistaDB.  The same database can be used in a single user application, and then upgraded to allow multi user access easily across the local LAN.

Medium Trust - Shared hosting

Not everyone owns a dedicated internet server, or can afford to rent a SQL Server when starting out.  VistaDB can run in most shared hosting environments with Medium Trust settings.  This lets you start out small, and grow as the business needs more power.

Larger multi user - to Enterprise

What if your new application suddenly takes off in directions you never thought of?  Now your 10 user application needs to support 50, and maybe 1,000 tomorrow.  The VistaDB 3 Server will be released next year for medium sized deployments.  But what if you need even more scalability?  Because VistaDB syntax and data types are compatible with SQL Server you can scale your app up much, much higher with very little work. Isn't it nice to know that the future doesn't have to make you nervous about how you are going to scale your application?

TSQL - not going away

I think it is safe to say that TSQL is not going away.  Microsoft continues to ship more and more products built around it the primary interface for querying data.  Has it evolved in recent years?  Certainly, but that is healthy growth.  Microsoft is keeping up with the SQL standards, and answering what users want.

Dot Net

The third major release of Dot Net is already upon us.  I doubt many think Dot Net a passing fad, or that Microsoft will push it less in the future.  There have already been talks about a fully managed operating system in the future (Plan 9).  Microsoft is building more and more CLR based tools and technologies into their products.  The new programming API's for SQL Server 2005 and 2008 are CLR based.  You can now build custom procs in managed code rather than having to resort to a dated C API.  It is not just the usage of the latest and newest technology either, it makes sense for programmer productivity, and for security. CLR Code can be reflected to see what calls it makes before it run.  The Silverlight browser plugin already offers a lightweight sandbox of CLR for writing plugins to the browser that are much safer than ActiveX controls.  CLR Code can also be restricted to run at certain trust levels.  Shared hosting providers were very nervous of enabling ASP hosting on shared windows boxes because so many ASP controls had to be put in the system32 folder, and required elevated privileges in order to operate.  That trend is gone.  Now the trend is to run with least privilege and to assume the application may be attacked at some point in the future.  Shared hosting companies rave about the Dot Net 2 framework for its ability to isolate runtime processes and prevent a single malicious or compromised control from bringing down the entire shared hosting server. 64 Bit is here today VistaDB can already run native on 64 bit platforms with the 64 bit framework from Microsoft.  This is not very important today, as most applications do not need that much memory address space yet.  But in the coming years of 4, 8, or even 32 core servers with as much as 128GB of ram it may not be about the single user access to all that data.  It is more likely to be about the engines ability to multithread and handle large blocks of ram from different users for different purposes.

Programmer speed

Programmer productivity studies continue to show that the Dot Net framework makes programmers more productive, write less bugs per line of code, and makes it easier to write more secure code at the same time. Build it or buy it? The age old questions for programmers.  The number of tools available to help programmers in the Visual Studio environment be more productive is amazing.  I see the Visual Studio integration market to continue to thrive for many years.  Controls, utilities, code generators, and more will continue to make us more productive in the future.

Summary

VistaDB is about giving your business choices over how and when to deploy your data.  Using the right tool for the job can save hours of frustration and design headache.  But what if the assumptions change later?  Isn't it nice to know that code written for VistaDB can be scaled up to SQL Server with very little changes if you need it in the future?  It's your product, we just want to give you as many options as we can.