Wow - I have been a fan of Redgate for a while. I have used some of their tools in the past (Ants, Sql Compare). In the past I have liked Apex SQL Edit for my SQL Server specific SQL Coding. Well - now Redgate is offering a free SQL Editor here. This comes via my pal John.

Gotta love free stuff;

Chris

Db4o is just plain good technology.

Db4o is an open source [caveats] object database for Java and/ or .Net. It is purposeful, cool, fun, impressive, well coded - all sorts of good.

Dr Dobbs Journal. I did some work with Db4oaround 6 months ago and was quite impressed with it in general. That being said - there are a few just amazing points about db4o:

1) I persist my C# object and it can be re-hydrated in a Java client or a .Net client ….
2) Native queries are amazing - especially with anon-delegates in .Net 2.0 - they look like…
3) You can easily refresh in memory objects to get updated changes from other objects out there in the DB.
4) Many lovely query mechanisms.
5) Now - they have Hibernate based replication between relational DBs and the object db ( or multiple object DBs).

Anon-Delegates look like this:

delegate(Student student){
return student.Age < 20
&& student.Name.Contains("f");
}

You are simply telling the object DB that you want a ‘Student’ with a certain ‘where clause’. The primary difference is that you are using … the native language - not some stringy SQL code.

Anyhow - enough for db4o - when I can get back to really using it - I will update.

-Chris