Problem: connectivity disruptions. Solution: Active Replication Fabric.

eXtremeDB Active Replication Fabric™ mitigates IoT connectivity issues and solves issues for developers.

eXtremeDB protects its data at rest through sophisticated AES encryption algorithms and in transmission by employing integrated SSL/TLS protocols for its communication channels.

How it works

Edge nodes‘ physical connectivity can be intermittent, and constrained. Some popular protocols have limited bandwidth (ZigBee, NFC and RFID, LPWAN, Bluetooth Low Energy, etc.). Edge device connectivity can be intermittent because of the physical device location (e.g. a mobile device) or because the device is battery operated and connects at certain predefined times. From the standpoint of data management, the unpredictable connectivity means that fully integrated support for “push” and “pull” protocols is important to preserve data collected at the edge.

We use the term “storage containers (opens in a new tab)” for databases maintained on edge devices that are mapped to an upstream database.

The eXtremeDB Active Replication Fabric (opens in a new tab) allows device-based applications to collect data, which is then automatically transmitted when connected.  Likewise, it also allows replicating server-side data to IoT devices; a common task for new device configuration and provisioning.  Data flow is fully automated through the Active Replication Fabric allowing developers to mitigate or even solve IoT connectivity issues.  The APIs provide automatic or on-demand data exchange between collection points and servers.

Whenever an object is inserted, updated, or deleted, a “replication timestamp” is written to the modified object (a separate “record” is maintained for deleted objects). The kernel keeps track of a “global timestamp” that indicates the last data replication event (e.g. when data was last synchronized with the gateway or server). During the next replication event, all records with a replication timestamp later than the “global timestamp” are included in the replication process.

NEW: eXtremeDB Edge Client

The eXtremeDB Edge Client is lightweight transactional storage for highly resource-constrained devices. It extends Active Replication Fabric to systems requiring as little as 8 KB of memory, allowing devices that cannot host a complete embedded database to participate directly in the distributed storage architecture.

The Edge Client supports multiple related data types and preserves referential integrity before replication. Even the smallest devices become full participants in the distributed storage architecture rather than simple message producers.

Security features

Multi-tier network topology and network discovery

eXtremeDB’s Active Replication Fabric supports complex IoT network topology; edge devices connect to gateways, gateways connect to other gateways closer to the cloud, which ultimately connect to servers in the cloud which may themselves consist of many shards/nodes. Further, any eXtremeDB instance in this topology might also be a member of a high availability group or an eXtremeDB Cluster. eXtremeDB’s xPanel dashboard includes a visual network discovery tool that greatly simplifies managing, monitoring and leveraging eXtremeDB’s tracing capability.

Data compression

Run-length encoding (opens in a new tab) (RLE) compression can be applied to columnar data (i.e. fields defined as the ‘sequence’ data type).  McObject tests show that activating this feature reduced storage space requirements by 75% and improved the speed of reading the database by 21%.  eXtremeDB also includes a feature for compressing non-columnar data.

eXtremeDB also offers low-level network compression.  IoT networks often use low-bandwidth networks which requires network traffic to be compressed. eXtremeDB implements compression at its System Abstraction Layer (SAL), meaning that compression can be applied to any supported socket type (plain TCP, SSL, local-domain, UDP and others).

Wherever you need it.