(Third of five posts related to the WWW 2009 conference, held the week of April 20, 2009.)
There are some points that came up in conversation at WWW 2009 that I will reiterate here. We find there is still some lack of clarity in the product image, so I will here condense it.
Virtuoso is a DBMS. We pitch it primarily to the data web space because this is where we see the emerging frontier. Virtuoso does both SQL and SPARQL and can do both at large scale and high performance. The popular perception of RDF and Relational models as mutually exclusive and antagonistic poles is based on the poor scalability of early RDF implementations. What we do is to have all the RDF specifics, like IRIs and typed literals as native SQL types, and to have a cost based optimizer that knows about this all.
If you want application-specific data structures as opposed to a schema-agnostic quad-store model (triple + graph-name), then Virtuoso can give you this too. Rendering application specific data structures as RDF applies equally to relational data in non-Virtuoso databases because Virtuoso SQL can federate tables from heterogenous DBMS.
On top of this, there is a web server built in, so that no extra server is needed for web services, web pages, and the like.
Installation is simple, just one exe and one config file. There is a huge amount of code in installers — application code and test suites and such — but none of this is needed when you deploy. Scale goes from a 25MB memory footprint on the desktop to hundreds of gigabytes of RAM and endless terabytes of disk on shared-nothing clusters.
Clusters (coming in Release 6) and SQL federation are commercial only; the rest can be had under GPL.
To condense further:
- Scalable Delivery of Linked Data
- SPARQL and SQL
- Arbitrary RDF Data + Relational
- Also From 3rd Party RDBMS
- Easy Deployment
- Standard Interfaces