Mindscape has announced a new version of their dot net ORM tool named Mindscape LightSpeed 3. Version 3 includes support for VistaDB 4 and a lot of other new features. Priced at only $199 per developer (source is available for an extra fee) LightSpeed is a very cost effective tool to add to any developers tool belt. There is also a free version available for databases with less than eight tables if you just want to take the product for a test drive.
We recently spoke with John-Daniel Trask of Mindscape about their new release, and adding support for VistaDB 4.
What is the minimum version that supports VistaDB? What version of VistaDB?
All current versions of LightSpeed support VistaDB 3.x. Support for VistaDB 4 was added for LightSpeed 3.0. It’s important to note that unlike other object relational mappers, the support for databases goes beyond the core mapping framework – we have full visual designer support integrated into Visual Studio. LightSpeed has supported full schema round tripping for some time which means developers can migrate changes they have made to their model down to the database AND from the database up to the model, depending on how they prefer to work.
What is the experience for a new developer using your product?
When a developer is targeting VistaDB but they still want all the benefits of an object relational mapper, then LightSpeed is the answer. We have aimed to provide more than just the core mapping framework and try to give developers a fantastic end to end experience. With the Visual Studio designer a developer can literally be up and running with their data model in under 10 minutes. They can be even more product with LightSpeed 3.0 which can create and manage database schema migrations automatically – saving valuable time from writing SQL migration scripts manually.
We have a great getting started video which demonstrates the first user experience. In the video we target SQL Server however the experience is identical across most underlying database engines.
What was your reason for adding VistaDB support?
We received requests from new users who wanted to work with VistaDB and who also wanted to use LightSpeed. We added support and now have many more happy VistaDB users using LightSpeed for their data access and domain modeling needs.
What was your experience adding support for VistaDB compared to other database engines?
Originally support was added easily – the way our provider architecture is built meant there was very little work required to get the core framework speaking to VistaDB comfortably. There were some initial challenges in adding support for the Visual Studio designer, however this was primarily around learning the queries required to get meta data from VistaDB about what tables exist, fields, etc. One other challenge we have encountered is the lack of a command line tool that would allow us to rebuild our test database in a continuous integration environment. Unfortunately we cannot run the GUI builder as part of our CI process.
(NOTE: VistaDB does provide a sample called VistaDBcmd that can run scripts from a command line similar to sqlcmd for SQL Server)
Describe a typical user story for your product, how do users choose the database engine being used by the product?
Developers come to the LightSpeed/VistaDB combination from two directions. First, we have customers for whom LightSpeed is their ORM of choice, but have a project that needs a lightweight local database with managed code ease of deployment and more comprehensive T-SQL support than competitors like SQLite and SQL CE. For those customers, VistaDB is an obvious choice. Second, we have customers who have already adopted or are planning to adopt VistaDB, but want to improve their productivity over what's possible with data readers and handwritten SQL. For these customers, LightSpeed provides a huge boost by being easy to understand and to set up, allowing them to get productive within a matter of minutes.
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