What is a software ‘connector’?
Open source news to end the week looks to the somewhat incongruous connection between Menlo Park California and Helsinki — it can only be MariaDB Corporation with that HQ combo.
Updates to end 2018 see the new availability of the MariaDB Connector for Node.js, giving developers a method to build Node.js applications on top of MariaDB’s enterprise relational database.
MariaDB uses pluggable, purpose-built storage engines to support workloads that previously required a variety of specialised databases. Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform JavaScript run-time environment that executes JavaScript code outside of a browser.
Node.js is currently enjoying positive developer survey rankings on Stack Overflow and HackerRank.
When benchmarked against other popular Node.js drivers, the MariaDB Connector performed 1.7 times faster in query mode and 35 times faster in batch mode.
What is a software connector?
If that doesn’t paint enough of a picture to answer the question posed in our headline… then let’s try a definition from O’Reilly as linked here and shown below.
“Simply put, software connectors perform transfer of control and data among components. Connectors can also provide services, such as persistence, invocation, messaging and transactions, that are largely independent of the interacting components’ functionalities. These services are usually considered to be ‘facilities components’ in widely used middleware standards such as CORBA, DCOM and RMI.”
Director of technical marketing at MariaDB Corporation Thomas Boyd says that developers are tired of the limitations of building Node.js applications on top of NoSQL.
“We’re seeing a growing trend of developers using MariaDB to replace the ‘M’ in the MEAN stack to enable a broader view of the data across the business using standard SQL,” said Boyd.
The MEAN stack is MongoDB, Express.js, AngularJS (or Angular) and Node.js.
With the MariaDB Connector for Node.js, developers enjoy better overall application performance through the Connector’s Insert Streaming and Pipelining functions. These capabilities reduce network traffic and enable asynchronous processing of database queries from a Node.js application, making the processing of multiple database queries far more efficient.
The Connector works with MariaDB’s standard SQL layer, providing access to the latest MariaDB database features and innovation, such as temporal processing, advanced data protection and more, as well as ease of access to data for reporting and analytics.
The MariaDB Connector for Node.js is available for download as a Release Candidate now.