Endpoint Systems, a system integrator and developer of endpoint software solutions, today announced delivery of Figaro, an embedded, native XML database for the Microsoft .NET Framework. Figaro has partnered with Oracle to extend the Oracle Berkeley DB XML engine, a native XML database engine combining a document parser, XML indexer, XML query engine, and Oracle Berkeley DB, to create one of the fastest and most efficient data access layers for the .NET Framework.

The Figaro database engine is perfect for Microsoft .NET developers building mission critical, high-performance applications using structured data. It runs directly in the application that uses it, with no separate server required, and no administration needed. Figaro manages XML documents using XQuery and APIs, and offers advanced data management services including indexing, metadata, transactions and master-slave replication for high availability and fault tolerance.

“Figaro offers .NET developers a database engine that lets them literally stop thinking about data structures and schemas,” said Lucas Vogel, owner of Endpoint Systems. “Using the API in conjunction with the highly extensible XQuery engine, developers can build high-performance applications that can easily extend support into JSON and other formats. It’s the perfect database engine for Windows, web and API apps, and its native XML and metadata support make it a fantastic option for BizTalk Server applications, a platform we plan on building adapters and other features for. Figaro applications can be deployed to Windows or the cloud – we’ve even had a successful deployment targeting XBox.”

Vogel developed Figaro after looking for database platform alternatives to SQL Server for storing semi-structured and XML data. By building the Figaro .NET extension to Berkeley DB XML, he found he could persist data objects by simply serializing them, without the need for ORM libraries. With the high availability features, he found himself able to build a client application using .NET while replicating data to/from Python, PHP and other languages and platforms supported by Oracle Berkeley DB XML.

Enterprise-class storage designed for networked applications

Figaro stores terabytes of data in a single document repository. The database can survive power outages, software errors and hardware failures without losing data. It supports simultaneous access to the document store by large numbers of users, and offers features such as hot backup to help guarantee continuous uptime.

Flexibility, Stability and Compatibility

Figaro is intended for use within applications that need to store data locally and run in an unattended fashion. The variety of applications that can use it is broad, ranging from desktop applications to video games to EDI services and financial applications.

“XML as a data platform may not be in the news much, but the list of new and updated industry standards supporting the format hasn’t slowed down much since inception, indicating to us that while XML may not be trending in web development circles, the generation of XML data is as strong as ever,” Vogel said. “Our aim is to ensure .NET developers have a database option that not only meets their data storage requirements, but gives them the flexibility they need to support the consumption of that data in any format necessary, and the ability to move to any platform or language as their needs change.”

Because the databases built with the Figaro library use Oracle Berkeley DB XML, they can be consumed by libraries built for just about any language/platform. Figaro XML database customers inherit a data storage platform found on over 200 million servers and devices worldwide.

Figaro comes in four editions – Data Store (DS), for single-threaded applications; Concurrent Data Store (CDS), for multi-threaded read, single-threaded write operations; Transactional Data Storage (TDS) for multi-threaded, transactional operations; and High Availability (HA), for replication and multiple instance master-slave database application data storage requirements. Support for .NET Core is in the works, as is an API platform for building highly available data microservices.

Figaro is available through site licensing. Contact Endpoint Systems for more information see http://bdbxml.net/