Welcome to Zen
The following topics introduce the Zen database product:
About Zen
Zen is a reliable, low-maintenance, high-performance database management system (DBMS). Thousands of companies around the world license Zen and distribute it as the underlying data storage program for their data-intensive software products. These companies see no reason to build their own DBMS or license from a competitor once they experience the ease-of-use, reliability, and value offered by Zen.
No matter whether you received Zen with another product or purchased it yourself, this section explains a little about the product and why it is right for its purpose.
Competitive Advantages
Zen provides a number of advantages over other products available on the market. Here are just a few:
• Lowest total cost of ownership. An independent study conducted by Aberdeen Group concluded that no major database product can match the Zen low total cost of ownership. How do we do it? See the next bullet.
• No Database Administrator (DBA) required. You can look in the newspaper any day of the week and see classified ads for Oracle, Sybase, or SQL Server database administrators, with sky-high salaries. Zen offers the unique Zero Database Administrator, or Z-DBA™, architecture. Its easy-to-use tools, bulletproof installation, and set-it-and-forget-it simplicity make it the perfect workhorse for desktop, workgroup, and departmental applications.
• Scalable from the desktop to the Web. Zen is available in two editions: the Ultra-light™ Workgroup database engine supports single-user configurations up to small workgroup configurations. The Enterprise Server engine comes with a six-user license and scales to hundreds of concurrent users, including intranet and extranet applications. Upgrading to another configuration requires no changes to the supported application, just plug and play with the new database engine.
• Cross-platform support. Unlike some competitors, Zen does not lock you in to a single platform. Zen databases are binary-compatible and supported across Microsoft Windows and several varieties of Unix-based platforms.
• Big database features at a small price. Zen offers full security, encryption, management and monitoring tools, and a host of other features you would expect to see in more expensive DBMS products.
• Legendary stability and reliability. There’s no doubt why the Windows desktop accounting market uses Zen as the underlying database of choice. When you’ve got to manage important data, you go for the database engine that won’t let you down.
• Multiple access methods. Your application vendor can use the Btrieve API for blazing performance on bulk data operations, while offering the richness of ODBC, pure Java, and JDBC interfaces for data reporting, security, analysis, and standard compatibility. No other database management system offers all these access methods.
Transactional (Direct Data) Access or Relational Access
Zen offers an architecture that is totally unique in the database management market. Our product allows you to access the exact same data through the MicroKernel Engine and through the Relational Engine.
The transactional database engine, called the MicroKernel Engine, interacts directly with the data and does not require a fixed schema to access it. It uses a key-value associative array to store and access the data. Calls to the MicroKernel Engine are made programmatically with Btrieve API rather than through a query language, and so Zen does not have to parse the request. This places the MicroKernel Engine in the category of NoSQL databases. Low-level API calls and memory caching of data reduce the time required to manipulate data. See
The Zen MicroKernel Engine.
The second database engine, the Relational Engine, operates in a manner similar to other relational database engines, that is, through the support of Structured Query Language queries. The Relational Engine parses SQL queries and sends them to the MicroKernel Engine to run. See
The Zen Relational Engine.
The Zen MicroKernel Engine
The Zen MicroKernel Engine offers easy installation, uncomplicated maintenance, and high levels of performance and reliability. Zen provides a foundation on which you can run transactional applications or migrate to a relational database system.
Benefits
Zen MicroKernel Engine and its Btrieve API has been the data management system of choice for tens of thousands of applications around the world for more than 25 years now. In the highly competitive accounting software market – where reliability and performance are paramount – many of the top 10 vendors choose Zen. Many application developers choose Zen for its speed, data integrity, easy scalability, and low maintenance costs.
• Speed. The MicroKernel Engine is capable of subsecond response rates, even when building multi-gigabyte databases for hundreds of users. The engine achieves these high speeds through features such as internal indexing algorithms that cache pages for fast data retrieval and updates, and automatic index balancing to maintain fast data access, even as your files grow.
• Data Integrity. The MicroKernel Engine guarantees data integrity through rich transaction processing support, referential integrity controls, and automatic file recovery. In the event of a server or system failure, logging features and roll forward utilities allow you to recover data up to your last completed transaction.
• Scalability. Many client-server database applications begin on the desktop and scale with corporate growth. Zen provides easy scalability from workstation to large client-server environments.
• Low Cost. The low support costs experienced by Zen developers translate into low maintenance costs realized by Zen application end users. Zen eliminates the need for sustained database administration through automatic data recovery functions and easy-to-use utilities.
Features
The MicroKernel Engine offers many features, including the following:
• Direct interaction with the data that does not require fixed data schema to access the data. It uses a key-value system to store and access the data.
• Calls to the engine are made programmatically with the Btrieve API rather than through a query language, meaning that Zen does not have to parse the request.
• Low-level API calls and memory caching of data reduce the time required to manipulate data.
• Access to databases distributed across multiple engines.
• Robust transactions for both single-server systems and distributed multiserver systems.
• The engine operates in complete database transactions and guarantees full ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability).
• Records are stored in files which are roughly equivalent to the tables of a relational database engine. It supports multiple keys on a record and therefore multiple indexes in the file.
The Zen Relational Engine
The Zen Relational Engine offers easy installation, uncomplicated maintenance, and high levels of performance and reliability.
Benefits
Many relational database application developers choose Zen because it provides scalability, maintenance-free operation, and a small memory footprint:
• Standard Interface. SQL and ODBC provide a well-known and standardized foundation upon which to build useful applications.
• Speed. Zen offers direct ODBC access to the database engine. Many competitive products use a translation layer to translate ODBC calls to proprietary “native” relational API calls that then access the database engine. In contrast, the Zen ODBC driver calls the database engine directly, without translating ODBC calls to a proprietary relational API.
• Scalability. Zen allows you to scale applications from single-user to large client-server environments without changing the application or the database.
• Maintenance-Free Operation. Zen is simple to install and use. It requires no extensive setup or ongoing performance tuning by a database administrator.
• Small Memory Footprint. Zen has a limited footprint, requiring only a small amount of memory.
Features
The Relational Engine provides a flexible architecture that helps you easily scale your database applications from large client-server systems to single-user environments without additional coding. Zen offers easy installation, uncomplicated maintenance, high levels of performance and reliability, and a smooth migration path for data. In addition, bundling Zen with your application is easy with the Zen distribution component, which provides multi- and single-user run-time support.
• Application scalability from standalone to client-server
• Fully functional Workgroup and client-server engines
• Declarative referential integrity
• Bidirectional, updateable, and scrollable cursors
• Named database support providing location transparency for applications
• Comprehensive, industry standard data type support
• Programming extensions such as triggers and stored procedures
• Cost-based optimization from statistical analysis and enhanced fetch algorithms
• Transaction processing enhancements such as full transactional logging
• Standards enhancements, including ODBC and ADO.NET support
• Other features include additional Windows utilities, large file support (up to 256 GB), and additional data type variables such as TIMESTAMP, UNSIGNED, and CURRENCY.
About the Zen Database Editions
This topic provides basic information about the Zen Enterprise Server, Cloud Server, and Workgroup editions. For a discussion of Zen architecture, see
The Zen Component Architecture in
Advanced Operations Guide.
Zen Enterprise Server and Cloud Server
Zen Enterprise Server and Cloud Server are designed to support up to many hundreds of concurrent network users when installed on the required hardware. They are capable of supporting web, corporate, departmental, and other client-server or web-based applications where reliability and performance are critical.
Zen Enterprise Server and Cloud Server differ in that Cloud Server supports capacity-based licenses for service bureau, software as a service, or other multiplexed environments, while Enterprise Server supports licenses for end-user client-server applications. No additional license is required for use with hypervisor features such as live migration, failover, fault tolerance (FT), high availability (HA), and disaster recovery.
Zen Workgroup
Zen Workgroup is designed to support single-user or small workgroup installations.
Zen Workgroup offers the same level of reliability and features as Zen Enterprise Server. The only differences lie in networking and performance in mid- and large-size environments.
Zen Workgroup offers a flexible approach to accessing data on remote servers in a variety of small network configurations. If you have data files on a remote file system with no database engine present, you can configure Zen Workgroup so that a particular engine is always used to access the remote data, or you can set it up so that the first engine to access the files acts as a server for those files until there are no more requests for data. After this point, the next engine to access the files then owns them while requests are coming in.
A Zen license cannot be installed on more than one machine. Your user count license refers to the number of client connections allowed to that engine, not to the number of machines to which you are allowed to install the Zen engine. In a Workgroup environment, every machine that will access Zen data should have the Workgroup engine installed.
Server and Workgroup Comparison
The following table lists differences between the Server and Workgroup editions.
Zen SDK
The Zen SDK includes many features to ease the burden of application development.
• Low-level APIs. Direct programming to the Btrieve API gives you the fastest possible data access and the most control over the way in which your application reads and writes data. If these considerations are important to you and you are willing to develop the code that incorporates your business rules, you may find direct API programming highly useful. For relational access to data, you may also code directly to the Microsoft ODBC API.
• ODBC. Zen offers a native ODBC driver.
• ADO.NET data provider. The Zen edition of this data provider provides support for the Microsoft .NET Framework, and is an ADO.NET-managed data provider, built with 100% managed code.
• Java. The Java Interface gives you the option of developing Btrieve applications in an object-oriented, platform-independent manner. It includes support for true null and Unicode values as well as for Binary Large Objects (BLOBs).
• Distributed Tuning Interface and Objects. These two related interfaces allow applications to tune and manage the database engine itself, including configuration parameters and aspects of security.
• Complete sample application. Zen SDK includes a complete sample application designed to run a video rental store. Full sample code in Visual Basic, Delphi, Java, and C/C++ is supplied. Examples using ODBC, third-party controls, and direct API calls are shown.
• The
Actian website is an online resource that gives you access to the latest Zen component downloads, code samples, documentation, and technical support.
Development Environment
Zen provides an open interface that allows you to develop many front-end applications, all of which can share a common transactional or relational database. You can use popular programming languages and environments such as Java, Delphi, BASIC, Visual BASIC, .NET, C, C++, COBOL, Pascal, ODBC, PowerBuilder (through ODBC), and FoxPro (through ODBC). In addition, you can bundle a Zen engine with your application using a Derivative Software License.