Raima has announced the latest development of its embedded database technology, with RDM Embedded 11 now integrated directly into National Instruments’ LabVIEW. The award winning database API brings seamless access to a robust, industrially proven database from within LabVIEW, delivering high performance, high availability and multi-core scalability, with a distributed architecture, and providing local database management for applications deployed on CompactRIO and Single Board RIO devices.
The LabVIEW native interface for Windows or VxWorks seamlessly integrates Raima’s high performance embedded database management system within the LabVIEW environment, meeting the needs of a wide range of industrial and workstation applications where large amounts of data must be stored, managed and accessed. Standalone operation is possible because the database resides in the LabVIEW data directory.
Raima Database API for LabVIEW, implemented with RDM Embedded 11, enables LabVIEW programmers to quickly and easily design data management functionality into their software applications. Raima has been certified by National Instruments as “Compatible with LabVIEW” so that LabVIEW programmers may reduce their learning curve and speed time to deployment. Useful features such as circular tables that can be queried by SQL have been specifically designed for embedded application needs. The Silver Certified version is available on the NI LabVIEW Tools Network.
The RDM Embedded 11 database engine has been developed to fully utilize multi-core processors, run with minimal memory, and support both in-memory and on-disk storage. Optimised for embedded systems and applications, it provides a subset of the ANSI/ISO standard SQL that is suitable for running on a wide variety of computers and embedded operating systems which may have limited resources due to hardware limitations or high demands from other onboard applications.
With multi-core scalability, Raima Database API for LabVIEW efficiently uses threads with transaction processing to take advantage of multi-core systems for optimal speed. The ACID compliant database engine supports multiple indexing methods, including B-tree and hash indexes, according to application and performance requirements. Further, RDM Embedded 11 implements multi-versioning concurrency control, enabling read-only transactions to see a virtual snapshot of the embedded database while it is being concurrently updated, so avoiding read locks and improving multi-user performance.
RDM Embedded 11 can be configured to run on-disk, in-memory or a hybrid of the two, combining the speed of an in-memory database with the stability of on-disk in a single system. Further, any application can be connected to one or more databases and queried as if they were a single database, enabling true global queries.
The embedded database technology is also available as RDM Embedded Plus, which builds in a number of additional features such as master-slave database replication, third party replication, master/slave mirroring, synchronous or asynchronous mirroring. It also offers improved performance through ‘scaling out’, which enables users to easily achieve true horizontal scaling across clustered or distributed systems without the need to re-write the application. The Plus version of RDM Embedded will be offered in a future release of Raima Database API for LabVIEW.
Sanjay Challa of National Instruments comments: “Raima Database API for LabVIEW is the first technology to deliver relational data management locally on real-time CompactRIO devices. It supports VxWorks, will soon support NI Linux real-time targets, and enables one or more CompactRIO or Single-Board RIO devices to store and share data without requiring connectivity to external database servers. It provides an ideal solution for everything from logging and querying both event and stream-based data to building a full SCADA solution. Raima won the LabVIEW Tools Network Embedded Systems Product of the Year Award because of the products broad reach. Many people can benefit from a database, unlike solutions tailored to more niche needs. It builds on the LabVIEW value add with the API.”
Wayne Warren, CTO of Raima adds: “LabVIEW has become a defacto standard for engineers and scientists developing embedded and mobile automation and control applications. With the introduction of Raima Database API for LabVIEW, users now also have a rugged, proven solution for the safe handling of large amounts of data from directly within LabVIEW, without any communication or configuration headaches. We are very excited to receive this prestigious award.”