SQL CE – Gallery Server

26 Aug, 2015

Experiments with SQLite

By Roger Martin| 2016-12-01T16:37:39+00:00 August 26th, 2015|Dev Insight|0 Comments

Long time fans of Gallery Server may recall that versions earlier than 2.5 supported SQLite as a database option. At the time it was a great choice because it was a file-based database that was robust, fast, required no extra software on the server, and required no maintenance. The only real downsides were that we had to distribute both a 32-bit and 64-bit version, and it ran only in Full Trust environments (no worky on GoDaddy). When Microsoft released SQL CE 4, we realized it would solve both of these issues, so in 2.5 we dropped SQLite support and moved to SQL CE. Overall it's been a great move - it just "works" and people who use it almost never have to interact with the underlying database. But it came with a price. It is slow. So slow that customers who use SQL Server often see a 20-fold increase in database performance. If you're running [...]

SQL CE performance improvements in 2.6.1

By Roger Martin| 2016-12-01T16:37:49+00:00 February 16th, 2012|Dev Insight|0 Comments

Galleries using SQL CE benefited from significant performance improvements in 2.6.0. Retrieval of data was up to 15 times faster than in 2.5. However, many users noticed that synchronize operations still were slower than both SQL Server and the now obsolete SQLite data provider (replaced by SQL CE in 2.5). This week I focused on analyzing the source of the difference with an aim to improve it. I am pleased to say that I succeeded in achieving about a 50% speed improvement with only a minimal change. I will soon be releasing 2.6.1, which contains this benefit as well as several bug fixes. Before I dig into the details, I want to mention that the upcoming .NET 4.5 runtime is expected to bring additional performance benefits to SQL CE users. The ADO.NET Team just announced some details that show a real world app running 67% faster under .NET 4.5 than [...]

Version 2.6 is faster and brings new uploader, iOS support, video/audio encoding, and more

By Roger Martin| 2016-12-01T16:37:49+00:00 October 10th, 2011|Announcements|4 Comments

You know, I wasn’t planning to release a version 2.6. Right after 2.5 was released a few months ago, I started cranking away on version 3, which is a significant release that adds all the top features you voted for in the poll. It was coming along great when something happened. A fan of GSP came along and was willing to pay good money if I immediately added two features: (1) on-the-fly encoding of AVI videos to the web-friendly MP4 format, and (2) the ability to select multiple files in one step on the add objects page. So I added those features to the 2.5 codebase and gave it to the client as a custom build. These are features many of you would find useful, so I will soon be releasing version 2.6 to bring them – and a few bonus features - to you. Here is the complete list: [...]