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What's included and excluded

What's Included

InstantDB supports all of the the following features.
  • Indexes
  • Inner joins via the WHERE clause
  • Sub-selects, including correllated sub-selects
  • Data caching
  • Data encryption
  • Transaction processing with automatic table locking
  • Automatic deadlock detection
  • Triggers
  • Imports from text files or other JDBC data sources
  • Full PreparedStatement support
  • Multiple disk support
  • Table aliasing
  • Unlimited simultaneous Connections and Statements
  • Thread safety
  • Date, currency and binary data types
  • AUTO INCREMENT integer values
  • Configurable date and currency formatting
  • AVG, MAX, MIN, SUM and COUNT functions
  • GROUP BY and HAVING
  • ORDER BY
  • ALTER TABLE
  • SELECT, INSERT, DELETE, UPDATE
  • CREATE, DROP, IMPORT
  • COMMIT, ROLLBACK
  • NULL, UNIQUE and DISTINCT testing
  • Readonly mode
  • Debug tracing
  • Meta-data support
  • Results set navigation extensions
  • Zero maintenance operation
  • Tuning capabilities to balance performace and reliability
  • Millenium compliance and millenium aware capabilities
  • Automatic recovery

What's Missing

  • No outer joins
  • No database views
  • No multiple user names or priviliges
  • No BIT, NUMERIC or DECIMAL types
  • No numeric or string functions
  • No understanding of foriegn Keys or referential integrity checking
  • ANY and ALL are not supporyed.
Many of the above features will be included in later releases. If users have any particular preferences for the order in which these should be implemented then please feel free to say so.

Miscellaneous Limitations

Joins are currently only supported in the WHERE clause, e.g WHERE table1.col = table2.col. Joins are not currently supported via the ANSI standard NATURAL JOIN or INNER JOIN phrases in the FROM clause. InstantDB accepts such statements as syntactically correct, but currently ignores them.

There is also a limitation on the use of the UNIQUE keyword when use in a CREATE TABLE statment. If several columns are included in a UNIQUE clause, then InstantDB ensures that each column is individually unique. This deviates from the ANSI SQL specification where the columns should be collectively unique. This will be fixed in a future release. For safetys sake, it is recommended that only a single column be used in each UNIQUE clause. Collective uniqueness across multiple columns can be enforced using the CREATE UNIQUE INDEX statement.

InstantDB is a single database program. Attempting to open more than one database simultaneously will result in an exception.

Java Compatability

All the classes were compiled using the 1.1 JDK. All deprecated methods have been removed. This release will only run on 1.1 compliant JVMs.

InstantDB has been successfully tested against Java 2 (formerly JDK 1.2) and found to be fully Java 2 compatable.

InstantDB can't claim the 100% pure java badge (that costs money!). However, it does get through the JavaPureCheck test, which should be good enough to be getting on with.