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VMware vFabric SQLFire is a memory-optimized distributed SQL database delivering dynamic scalability and high performance for data-intensive modern applications. SQLFire’s memory-optimized architecture minimizes time spent waiting for disk access, the main performance bottleneck in traditional databases. SQLFire achieves dramatic scaling by pooling memory, CPU and network bandwidth across a cluster of machines and can manage data across geographies. SQLFire provides developers with the well-known SQL interface and tools.

Developing Applications with SQLFire explains the main concepts of programming Java and ADO.NET applications with SQLFire APIs and the SQLFire implementation of SQL. It describes how to embed a SQLFire instance in a Java application and how to connect as a client. This guide also describes transactional and non-transactional behavior, and explains how to create data-aware stored procedures.

SQLFire RESOURCES

Tutorial: Integrating SQLFire with tc Server and Spring Data

This article describes basic instructions of SQLFire usage in a simple Java and Spring-based application deployed in vFabric tc Server. The sample application used is a Spring-ified version of Sun's J2EE PetStore application.

Banking Case Study: Scaling with Low Latency using NewSQL

In this presentation, Jags Ramnaryan, Chief Architect for GemFire products at VMWare walks through how a bank used a horizontally scalable, memory oriented SQL database (VMWare SQLFire), did minimal changes to its application, injected the Database between the app and its original database and achieved elastic (on-demand) scaling with very low latencies.

Introducing SQLFire: a memory-optimized, high performance SQL database

Fast meets scalable in VMware’s new distributed SQL database. VMware vFabric™ SQLFire is memory-optimized for maximum speed out of the box and gives you the scale you need in a substantially simpler way. SQLFire is designed for horizontal scalability, so if you need more capacity you simply add more nodes (or more virtual machines) and SQLFire will automatically rebalance data across all members for maximum performance. Watch this webcast to learn how SQLFire offers some of the best features usually seen only in NoSQL databases, all while providing a real SQL interface.

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE SQLFire BLOG

Java Stored Procedure Performance: Myths vs. Facts

“Java Stored Procedures will never be as fast as SQL Stored Procedures” is a common refrain from database administrators based on their experience with stored procedures in “normal” relational databases.   However, SQLFire provides significant advantages for performance of stored procedures. SQL statements are byte compiled into Java structures and Java Stored Procedures run in the same memory and processing space that database operations are performed. Learn more in this blog. 

How to offload data from an existing data store and load it into SQLFire

A common requirement for using SQLFire is offloading data from an existing data store and loading it into SQLFire. This example shows how you can load data into a SQLFire distributed system using Spring Batch from a CSV file and then how to present the data from a simple Spring MVC application.

Using SQLFire as a read-only cache for MySQL

Putting a read-only cache atop an RDBMS helps by offloading some reads to another server.  A database that is constantly getting reads and writes for a lot of different users (high concurrency) leads to disk thrashing which leads to extremely bad performance. Serving a portion of reads in-memory cuts down on this thrash, making your write throughput go up on the underlying database. In addition, an in-memory architecture like SQLFire handles high concurrency extremely well since it doesn't suffer from thrashing problems the way disk-based databases do.

SQLFire and Grails

Chris Harris has written a series of blog posts showing how to use SQLFire from within Grails. In the process he introduces a couple of very interesting features of SQLFire , specifically how your app should take advantage of SQLFire's elasticity and the possibility of using SQLFire as a cache.