HSQLDB / HyperSQL 2.0 released

The developers of the "100% Java" database HSQLDB have announced HyperSQL 2.0 with a new core, improved scalability, query optimisation, stored procedures, new data types and support for SQL:2003-SQL:2008 core features. The previous version, HSQLDB 1.8, is used in applications such as OpenOffice for database storage. The new version is the result of a major rewriting of the internal components, for example, HypeSQL 2.0 has a fully multi-threaded core with two phase locking and multi-version concurrency control. Support for multi-gigabyte BLOBs (Binary Large Objects) allows for up to 64Tb of data to be stored and large result sets from queries can now be stored on disk at the server as they are being generated and accessed. Backup to TAR and GZIP archives of databases is now built into the database.

SQL improvements include the ability to handle procedural SQL in stored procedures, including WHILE, IF, CASE, WHEN and exception handling, new expression types, multi-row inserts and updates, support for all standard JOIN types and TRIGGER definitions. Data types such as BIT, BIT VARYING, CLOB, BLOB and INTERVAL are now implemented in accordance with the SQL standards. Full details of the new features are available on the projects features page. The software is licensed under a BSD based licence and can be downloaded from the project's SourceForge page.

(djwm)