I’ve always found Jade to be an interesting beast- though admittedly only ever from afar. Object databases always showed some promise yet never really went uber-mainstream- whether that was a result of any inherent weakness, lack of appropriate developer skills or bully boy behaviour by big RDBMS players who knows. Jade would certainly be one one the the bigger players in the space though and as a Kiwi tech guy it’s always nice to see local firms doing well. I’ve certainly come up against Jade systems in previous bids and I know a number of our customers have Jade applications running in-house.

The announcement (for all it's technical brevity) looks to indicate that it’s going to be a bunch easier for those of us in the .NET world to wire up our applications into a Jade system. I’m picking in the past we probably had to thunk through something nasty like either an unmanaged API or an ODBC layer which, given the idea of an OODBMS doesn’t really deliver the ideal experience.

It’s certainly something that’s going to be interesting to discuss with some of our existing customers. Being able to wire up Jade based back end (I hesitate to call them ‘legacy’ even though I want to) systems to next gen front end apps written in WPF and.or Silverlight could make for some exciting projects.

Pity that their developer license doesn’t really let it compete with SQL Express in the ‘no-cost’ end of the market. The license does not allow any commercial use.