McObject

Last Updated: 28th February 2020
Analyst Coverage: Philip Howard

McObject was founded in 2001 with headquarters in the United States and offices in Germany and China. There is also a major partner based in London, which has exclusive rights as a European distributor for eXtremeDB in high performance computing environments. This is in contrast to the German office, from which sales of eXtremeDB in device, edge and gateway devices are co-ordinated across Europe.

The company claims to have more than 30 million deployments of eXtremeDB in IoT devices spanning multiple verticals, including aerospace, telecommunications, industrial automation, the automobile sector and consumer electronics. Clients include GoPro, Boeing, Motorola, DirecTV, Audi, BAE, British Telecom and many others. The company also has a significant presence in financial services (capital markets) where it holds a number of records in the STAC (Securities Technology Analysis Center) M3 benchmarks, which have been designed to test time-series (stock tick) database capabilities. The company does not target the DevOps metrics and monitoring space that some other time-series database vendors focus on.

While eXtremeDB is primarily an embedded database it is also available in the cloud and it runs on all leading hardware platforms, including IBM Power series. There is a Financial Edition, recently rebranded as eXtremeDB for High Performance Computing, available for that vertical and, more generally, a free trial version is available for download. McObject also markets the Perst open source embedded object-oriented database management system.

Company Info

Headquarters: 33309 1st Way South, Suite A-208, Federal Way, Washington 98003
Telephone: 425 888 8505

McObject eXtremeDB

Last Updated: 28th February 2020
Mutable Award: Gold 2019

What is it?

Fig 01 eXtremeDB architecture

McObject’s eXtremeDB, whose architecture is illustrated in Figure 1, is an embedded (less than 200 KB footprint) hybrid in-memory and persistent database designed specifically to support time-series data. Unlike some other in-memory databases, it has specific capabilities designed to eliminate latency when transferring data between memory and CPU cache. Sequential data, such as time-series data, is stored in columnar format, while other data is represented in row format. There is an optional extension to allow data (transaction logging) to be persisted to disk as well as an optional SQL extension (to go along with the standard C/C++ API), which means that you can integrate visualisation tools such as Tableau or Qlik. Alongside this SQL capability there is a rule-based deterministic optimiser. As a general rule we prefer cost-based optimisers (especially if machine learning has been built-in) but in an embedded database it makes sense to take this approach as you do not want the overhead of gathering statistics. The database supports ACID properties and there are high availability and security features built-in, with support for inter-node replication and sharding. An XML extension is also available, as are compression capabilities.

Customer Quotes

“eXtremeDB helped cut 18 programmer months from the development cycle.”
Boeing

“eXtremeDB-64 contributes significantly to trading platform robustness, with a proven database transaction mechanism that is optimized for high throughput.”
Dalian Commodity Exchange

How does it work?

For time series data, database indexes are implemented against timestamps. For row-oriented data, eXtremeDB also supports hash indexes, B-trees, Patricie Trie, KD-trees and R-trees. The last of these is particularly notable since this is a technique used for geo-spatial indexing and eXtremeDB specifically supports bounded rectangles (note that points and lines are both collapsed rectangles). This is important, because many IoT applications involving time-series also have geo-spatial requirements. On the other hand, this is not typically true in financial situations where you are dealing with tick data. For these environments, McObject provides a library of around 150 vector-based statistical functions to support financial, and virtually all other mathematical/statistical analyses. These functions can be pipelined into a sequential series of operations.

Fig 02 eXtremeDB Performance Monitor

For managing your environment, the product comes with the xPanel Dashboard, which provides a number of monitoring and management capabilities. These include the xSQL Configuration Tool, the Feed Handler (settings for financial market feeds) Configuration Tool, the SQL System Analyzer, a Performance Monitor (see Figure 2), the Tracer (tracking run-time activity), a Database Browser, NetViewer, and a graphical user interface (which they all are) for viewing web service connectors.

Why should you care?

In financial markets eXtremeDB can not only out-compete other vendors focusing on processing tick data but it has the added advantage of supporting SQL and other conventional languages rather than proprietary ones, which is the case with some of its competitors. For other use cases within financial services, and possibly IoT also, we would like to see the product integrated with streaming technologies such as Kafka and Flink, but the company assures us that that would be easy to do.

In industrial and IoT environments the very small footprint of eXtremeDB is a major boon. While there are other databases with small footprints they do not generally have time-series and geo-spatial capabilities, so it comes as no particular surprise that eXtremeDB has so many millions of implementations.

The Bottom Line

McObject eXtremeDB is the leading database for embedded IoT and industrial environments. It is competitive in capital markets without being a dominant player in the same way that it is within (edge) devices and gateways.

Mutable Award: Gold 2019

Commentary

Coming soon.

Solutions

McObject eXtremeDB

Research

TIME SERIES MarketUpdate cover thumbnail

Time-Series and Temporal databases and analytics

Time-series databases represent the fastest growing database sector over the last two years.

McObject eXtremeDB

McObject eXtremeDB is an embedded (less than 200 KB footprint) hybrid in-memory and persistent database designed specifically to support time-series data.

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