Archive for the ‘LightSpeed’ Category

Nightly news, 3 September 2010

Tagged as LightSpeed

Not much to relate this week as we’ve been at TechEd for most of it, but we’ve managed to fit in a few fixes. Here’s the deal.

LightSpeed

• Go To Linked Entity now works if the .lsmodel files are in project subfolders
• We’ve added a workaround for the ObjectDisposedException bug in the .NET TransactionScope class
• We’ve fixed an error on SimpleDB if you were using Count with paging
• Fixed an error during model creation on VS2010
• Fixed an issue where abstract STI base classes were incorrectly not considered for designer database sync

All these fixes are in the latest nightly builds. Enjoy!

Add your comments
Posted by Ivan Towlson on 2 September 2010

Nightly news, 27 August 2010

Tagged as LightSpeed, WPF Diagramming

Well, that was August. Four releases in four weeks. Mindscape HQ has been a non-stop riot of launch parties and last-minute brow-furrowing attempts to think of amusing discount codes. Despite all that we still have few updates in the nightlies.

LightSpeed

• Fixed an issue where auto through entity tables were not created during database sync if the source was a STI derived entity
• Added a check for the Client Profile when creating a new LightSpeed model

WPF Diagramming

• Fixed DiagramPrinter printing nodes whose elements had been set to invisible

We’d like to remind customers that most of the Mindscape crew will be at TechEd New Zealand for the first three days of next week and this is likely to impact forums support. Please be patient — we’ll respond to posts when we can.

Add your comments
Posted by Ivan Towlson on 26 August 2010

SimpleDB Batching in LightSpeed 3.11

Tagged as LightSpeed

One of the enhancements made to LightSpeed 3.11 was to improve the efficiency of inserts when working with SimpleDB. If you’ve not heard of SimpleDB, it’s a cloud based database offering from Amazon. It’s not a traditional relational database, but rather a key/value store which is pretty neat if you’re into that sort of thing. We first released support for mapping over SimpleDB last year and got a great response from people wanting to explore SimpleDB. Nicely, LightSpeed is still the only .NET ORM that supports SimpleDB :-)

Storm clouds

One of the potential performance problems with cloud based databases is that queries take the form of a web request. As you’ll be well aware, these are an order of magnitude slower that calling a database running on your machine, or even on your same network segment. Unfortunately this means that if you wanted to push a heap of inserts into your database the SimpleDB provider would chug away making a call… getting a response… making the next call… getting a response… and so on. This latency made performance really quite slow for large data loading exercises.

Batched put attributes

Jeremy started investigating what could be done and found Amazon had enhanced the API for SimpleDB (and surfaced it through their .NET wrapper) to allow for “batched puts” which is SimpleDB lingo for batching of inserts. With a little bit of work on the core engine, LightSpeed can be configured to batch up inserts into collections of 25 – which is the limit that Amazon imposes on the batch size. This yields ~25x performance for inserts.

Turning on batching for SimpleDB

As this capability was not being released as part of a major version change we’ve left it to developers to enable this functionality. It’s pretty easy to do, just add the following to your connection string for SimpleDB providers:

Enable Batch Insert=true

More improvements planned

Currently batching is only enabled for the insert operations. Support for update operations is planned and then we will likely investigate some additional performance enhancements we can make to ensure that LightSpeed continues to earn it’s name. Also, a special mention must be made to our LightSpeed user “MiddleTommy” who has provided great feedback on working with LightSpeed which lead to this enhancement being made – thanks! :-)

Hope that helps all our SimpleDB users out there! Also, if you’re tinkering with SimpleDB, be sure to check out our SimpleDB Management Tools which gives a SQL Management Studio feel to working with SimpleDB directly from within Visual Studio.

Add your comments
Posted by John-Daniel Trask on 26 August 2010

LightSpeed 3.11 Released!

Tagged as LightSpeed, News

The bestest .NET ORM just got more awesomer!

We’re stoked to have just released LightSpeed 3.11! Originally going to be 3.2 but we thought we’d pay homage to one of the greats in software history :-)

So, fresh from the oven, what’s new? Here’s a high level list of the improvements:

• Support for SQL CE 4 both in the core and designer (meaning currently the LightSpeed model designer is about the only visual tool for designing a SQL CE 4 schema!)
• Support for user-defined runtime conversions between database and CLR types, including designer support
• Super sparkle keyboard support in the designer for users who love hot keyboard action
• Improvements to querying, particularly in nested queries and complex grouping statements
• Improvements to handling of inheritance structures both in the core and designer
• Serialization of entities improved for remoting situations
• Improved support for Visual Basic oddities with LINQ queries
• Improved model checking and messaging in the designer to make it easier for new users
• Usability and visual improvements for linked model files which is great for large models.
• Added UpdateEntityState for manually setting entity state for testing purposes (in the Mindscape.LightSpeed.Testing namespace)
• Improvements to the samples – better DTO sample, updated SQLite version in samples, and more
• Refresh on data providers to new versions of the SQLite, PostgreSQL, MySQL and VistaDB
• Batch support for SimpleDB users to improve insert speed by a lowly 2500%

Read the complete change log here.

If you’ve never used LightSpeed, grab the free edition and have a play – we’re sure you’ll enjoy it and you’ll be up in running in about 10 minutes (start the timer!). If you’re already a customer you can grab the 3.11 release from your account page – we strongly recommend upgrading.

SUMMER PROMOTION SALE
We’re offering a staggering 50% off if you purchase LightSpeed before Friday this week – that’s a saving of $174.50 USD! Head to the store, grab the LightSpeed 3 – 1 Developer edition (RRP $349 USD) and use the following discount code:

ISEETHELIGHT

Just make sure you use it by Friday! Grab a copy and see why you’ll never want to use a different ORM again! :-)

Add your comments
Posted by John-Daniel Trask on 23 August 2010

LightSpeed and VistaDB 4.1

Tagged as LightSpeed

As VistaDB users will be aware, VistaDB 4.1 was released towards the end of July, and we’ve had a few questions asking when we were going to switch over.

We’ve been holding off because we’re not sure how quickly people have been migrating to 4.1, but with the next LightSpeed release coming rapidly down the tracks, we’ll be making the switch as of tonight’s nightly build (dated 24 August, and available from about 1500 GMT).

If you’re a VistaDB 4.1 user, please pull down the new nightly when it’s available and let us know if you run into any problems!

Add your comments
Posted by Ivan Towlson on 23 August 2010