February 26 2009 
Valentina 4 for Revolution
Reporting from Everywhere
If you've done any database work with Revolution, chances are you've heard something about Valentina – that its really fast, that it works with Revolution on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux or that its supported by some guys with really funny English. These things are all true!
Valentina for Revolution 4 is also the result of a full year of development – loads of efficiency improvements and some extremely useful new features that add new and powerful business data and reporting features to your application.
The Valentina Difference
Valentina DB is a columnar database that can act like a relational database if you want it that way. But Valentina doesn't have all the inefficiencies of relational databases – some kinds of fat intermediary relational tables can be replaced with sleek Valentina links – and as a result, queries are lightning fast. One customer ported a MySQL database to Valentina and had their database size reduced by almost one third, and some queries now run hundreds of times faster. A several hour query for a business report ran under 10 minutes. As your data store grows, the more you appreciate this feature!
But Valentina is lavishly packed with very modern architecture in addition to this speed advantage – for example:
- A modern architecture that lets you write shorter, easier to read queries*
- A network ready architecture that's designed to handle thousands of queries coming in at once across a network
- A tested but modern code base that makes the database kernel itself extensible
- All of the standards you expect: SQL, XML, Unicode, 448-bit encryption, BLOBs, stored procedures and more.
*QUERY COMPARISION
Compare SQL queries you would have to write with JOIN for MS SQL Server or mySQL:
SELECT *
FROM Person JOIN PersonPhone ON Person.id = PersonPhone.person_ptr
JOIN Phone ON PersonPhone.phone_ptr = Phone.phone_id
And the Valentina native object way:
SELECT *
FROM Person JOIN Phone
Reporting from Everywhere
Valentina's native extensibility lends itself to not only adding new features but really integrating them. Consider a new addition with Valentina 4 – Valentina Reports.
Almost any business or financial application uses reporting services of some kind – and most reporting comes down to rendering data from several different tables or sources into something meaningful and visual.
Because Valentina Reports nestles itself into the kernel it enables many kinds of applications. Valentina 4 also introduced a new project format for storing datasources, named queries, reports. Valentina SQL can return a report right into a BLOB field of a cursor, opening the way to generate reports via ODBC or other common APIs.
Together, this means the business logic of your desktop application and associated reports can be managed by Valentina and be quickly scalable to the server by registering your project there.
Build Reports For Free
You can build beautiful reports with charts, graphs, sub-reports, graphical objects, barcodes (36 of them – from US postal codes to ISBN for books) in Valentina Studio Pro 4, a visual builder that is currently in beta – and free for use while in beta! Just download a free serial from the website at http://www.valentina-db.com.
In turn, your reports can be used with Valentina for Revolution ADK + Reports and transformed into print, XML enriched PDF (with XML tags, security and permissions), graphics, LaTeX, text or a web page. Of course, you can also run queries and reports right within Valentina Studio Pro, too.
Take Me to Your Server
All Valentina ADKs (application developer kits) including Valentina for Revolution ADK let you communicate remotely with Valentina Office Server and Valentina Embedded Server. Valentina Office Server 4, a per deployment product, includes Valentina Reporting Services at no additional cost over Valentina Office Server 3.x.
Valentina Server 4 also added other great features, like user rights management and generating XML directly from SQL.
Bring together Valentina ADK for Revolution + Reports and Valentina Office Server, and you have a powerful and complete client-server and application server environment that you can deploy on your network. Valentina Office Server also includes additional features like SSL, Bonjour and a full year of upgrades.
Upgrade to Valentina Developer Network + Reports, and you can deploy copies of Valentina Embedded Server with Reporting Services to your customers – royalty free. That is reporting on either or both your local application or on the server. Higher levels of VDN also give you an ODBC driver and a client library that can be used for iPhone development.
Revolution and Valentina 4 taken together – you get the best of both worlds. Load as much of your business logic onto Valentina itself for blazing speed, then bring only the results back into your Revolution application.
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