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History: How VistaDB was developed

In 2000, we set out to design and develop the next generation database engine of our award-winning Apollo Xbase database engine from "scratch". Our original goal was ambitious -- we wanted to build a database engine that supported the same Xbase files that Apollo did, plus create a new, modern database format that was extremely robust, stored data more efficiently, supported more data types and provided larger storage capacity.

R&D on VistaDB (at the time referred to as "Apollo 7") commenced in 2001 using the latest database technology and development tools available. We carefully studied existing database products -- noting their best features while leaving their limitations behind -- and proceeded to design a generic data access layer to manage the various database formats we intended to support.

In early 2002, we created the first internal build of VistaDB 1.0 and soon thereafter the builds were becoming quite stable and feature-rich. By late 2002, we put the new engine to the test by converting a large Delphi/Apollo application to .NET using C# and VistaDB 1.0. This was the very first application to use VistaDB and it served as an indispensable live testing environment that let us improve, find and correct many issues before ever releasing VistaDB to the public. This intense development and testing cycle lasted 8 more months and by mid-2003, VistaDB 1.0 was working quite well with all our testing.

There were still some important features missing from VistaDB 1.0 that prevented us from releasing it to the public. But, more importantly, after all this time, we wanted to make a good first impression and version 1.0 of VistaDB simply wasn't ready for prime time.

As more features and requirements were added to our new VistaDB database format, it became clear that supporting legacy Xbase file formats along with our new database format was simply not feasible. So in mid-2003, we came to the difficult decision of dropping Xbase support from VistaDB and instead using our new VistaDB database format as the only storage format VistaDB would support.

By this time, we had nearly five years of experience working with Apollo and we did not want to repeat mistakes we made in the past. We wanted to keep our new database development as streamlined as possible. We re-evaluated the development landscape and determined that .NET was clearly the future. With this, we knew exactly what it would take for us to deliver a fantastic product and we knew it would be very difficult to grow our technology quickly and provide great support without focussing all of our attention on making VistaDB the perfect database for .NET platform. That was another key decision which helped streamline our development efforts.

In the middle of 2003, with our .NET vision firmly in place, we set out to make VistaDB 2.0 the very best database engine for building small to midsize .NET database applications. To help our large customer base transition from Xbase and Win32 to VistaDB, we recently added native VCL support to VistaDB for Delphi and C++Builder and created an OLE DB Provider for VB developers still building Win32 database applications.

After many years and thousands of man hours of work, our commitment to VistaDB and .NET has paid off. We believe so firmly in this vision that we have invested all of our resources perfecting VistaDB and utilizing the Dot Net Framework. After 5 years, Apollo has been officially put in maintenance mode in order to clear the way for an exciting long-term future with VistaDB and .NET.

In early 2007 the release of Version 3 moves us fully into the managed namespace. Apollo was XBase, VistaDB 2 was partially managed and partially Delphi Code. VistaDB 3 is fully written in C# and even allows us to run under Mono.