Is there a market amongst programmers for an OID-keyed blob store?

Question

A friend has developed a very amazing blob store and I think it needs to be used, but I'm wondering whether people think such a thing has a market, and if programmers ever get to make these kinds of decisions. It has support for online backups using deltas and is much faster than anything I know of, it's undergone rigorous testing and being used in some very niche applications. I would think anyone with a binary file format would like to use it as an alternative. It has a C++ interface and has been adapted to .NET serialisation.

It absolutely blows SQL blob tables out of the water.

Thoughts?

Edit: It is better because:

• It is very fast.
• It is transactional, with a full recovery scan, so far better than flat files.

Answer 1

Thoughts? You haven't said how it is better... (or how it is better to a flat BLOB/database/file solution).

Also, regular .NET (binary) serialization isn't well-suited to long-term storage (in a database), since it is implementation-specific (and tied to the assemblies). For serialization, you might want to look at platform-independent solutions such as Google's protocol buffers (which has implementations for C++, java, C#, and others- including one of my own).

Answer 2

There's a market, but not a massive one. There is also long-established competition, see BerkleyDB (which was an independently marketted product (company name: SleepyCat), but they were bought by Oracle a while back.

Answer 3

Depending on the licensing and cost, I'd certainly look at it. I asked about something like this just a couple weeks ago, and ended up using an SQLite database file for the moment, which I suspect is less than optimal.

(And I run my own software development company, so I do make the purchasing decisions. :-) )