Brief about TIBCO ActiveSpaces
Business applications increase in sophistication, scope and scale each day. Due to this the amount of data being handled by them is enormous these days. Is storing all data in a database really the best option ? Cost of storage is high. Speed is of prime importance, but resilience is equally desirable. Applications are being implemented in an distributed approach, plus, now that the EventDriven solutions are on a roll. All these factors make us think
“Do the existing data layer solutions really cater to real-time systems in the so called Enterprise 3.0 age ?”
Introducing TIBCO ActiveSpaces® software which is a peer-to-peer distributed in-memory data grid.
ActiveSpaces provides an infrastructure for building elastic and highly scalable, fault-tolerant distributed applications. It combines the features and performance of databases, caching systems, and messaging software to support very large, highly changing data sets, and event-driven applications.
So basically it stores all data needed for your business applications processing in the memory of its peers (member agents) which run inside nodes spread across single or multiple machines.
Highlights :-
· Distributed implementation: for speed, scalability & fault-tolerance. Simplifies design and implementation of distributed solutions.
· ActiveSpaces uses adaptive algorithm to distribute data between the peers ensuring consistency & fault tolerance. Enables Active-Active implementations for data storage
· ActiveSpaces scales transparently: the capacity of the space automatically grows when new peers join. As the number of peers changes, applications continue to function smoothly, requiring no code modifications or restarts.
· Also suited for Events based systems. Enables applications to listen for data changes.
· Accessible by business applications by ActiveSpaces (API), available in C and in Java .
· Accessible by TIBCO SOA Environment by Businessworks plugin for ActiveSpaces or from BE via custom ontology.
ActiveSpaces behaves like a database
· Has a data definition language
· Has SQL-like where clause filters
· Can be made fault-tolerant using data replication
· Implements a form of horizontal partitioning
· Has locks for concurrent access control
· Includes support for transactions
· Supports CRUD operations (Create, Read, Update, Delete)
ActiveSpaces behaves like a messaging system
· Listeners give applications the ability to subscribe to changes in the data
· One or multiple recipients
· Changes to the data are immediately distributed to all intended recipients at the same time.
· Browsers let applications use a space as a queue
Use ActiveSpaces as a :
Distributed data cache : store copies of data that is too expensive to fetch or compute, from database/other sources. Easily scalable since synchronisation, coherency, locking etc is internally handled by ActiveSpaces.
In-memory operational datastore: A real-time data store aggregates data from multiple sources to speed processing. Having it in-memory makes the data instantly available for efficient processing to your application.
Space-based Architecture : Space-based architectures use a grid approach for both data storage and processing. Data storage and access is virtualized. Data communication and process coordination are both handled by
the space. Processing units are loosely coupled, and run in parallel.
Grid computing : refers to using multiple machines or nodes to solve one large computing problem. A complex problem is decomposed into smaller pieces that can be executed across many machines in parallel.
ActiveSpaces not only implements a scalable and reliable in-memory data grid , but also provides easy accessibility to consumer applications. Core business applications can use C or Java API for using ActiveSpace datasets for business logic. For Middleware solutions (SOA/EDA/BPM) Businessworks plugin for ActiceSpaces gives an very easy way to use the data store. In many solutions, BW shared variables are used for keeping larger operating data in memory, this can be better achieved with ease using ActiveSpaces & its BW plugin. Just a thought.