AtomDB - data management system for (mobile) web applications
At our last MobileMonday Austin event we had the pleasure of having as guest speaker Nikunj Mehta, team leader of the Atom DB project at Oracle.
It really was a great technical presentation by Nikunj, where he discussed mobile web applications, synchronization and disconnected databases. He introduced AtomDB which in my opinion has great potential for mobile web applications and the problem of intermittent connectivity, caching and offline data synchronization. Nikunj and his team definitely understand the problem and have come up with a very interested solution, AtomDB.
AtomDB is a browser-runtime component (plug-in) that allows (mobile) web applications to have a data access layer with relational data management and networked data synchronization capabilities. AtomDB uses standard technologies such as JavaScript-based APIs, the Atom syndication format for transport (publishing), and the web browser itself. Because it is a browser extension (plug-in) only browsers with plug-in support can be extended with AtomDB (an obvious observation); they are first proving/validating the technology using Windows Mobile, and other browsers will follow, probably with support for WebKit-based browsers coming up next.
With AtomDB, the (mobile) web application doesn’t have to worry about connectivity and network details — from the application itself, the data may or not reside on the handset, and AtomDB takes care of connectivity and synchronization details. AtomDB is a relatively new project and is (research) work in progress. I totally recommend that you follow up on this project.
If you are interested in learning more about AtomDB, see Nikunj’s blog The Asymptotic Tight Bound blog.
Below are Nikunj’s presentation slides Mobile Data Access Using AtomDB:
ceo

Enrique,
AtomDB is not meant to be used for relational data management. It is more correct to say that AtomDB is a data management system for (mobile) Web applications.
Its funny, Oracle is so synonymous with relational data that even when Oracle does things outside of the relational world, mistakenly people think it is relational.
Regards,
Nikunj
Heh, the persistence mechanism below is relational (data is stored on a relational DB), I guess it really doesn’t need to; OK, no relational model is exposed. Title of the article has been fixed. Thanks.