SAN FRANCISCO, CA – May 1, 2001–Matisse Software. today announced the availability of the first developer release of Matisse 5.0, the SQL-Object database platform. The Matisse platform enables developers across the world to implement new applications that require high performance on complex data.

With Version 5.0, Matisse is aiming squarely at the developer community. The first developer release, now available for free download at www.matisse.com, supports the most popular server platforms including Sun Solaris, Linux, Windows NT, and FreeBSD. In addition, Matisse 5.0 supports a broad range of language bindings including SQL, Java, C++, C, Python, Perl, PHP, and Eiffel. Most of the language bindings are being offered as open source software.

Matisse Version 5.0 marks the first release available to developers since Matisse acquired the rights to Matisse in December 1998. Matisse has previously used Matisse as an embedded database in its content management and CRM applications. According to Robert Blumberg, Matisse's President and CEO, "Matisse continues to have a worldwide following, and there has been an ongoing demand to make the database available. With the explosive growth of Java and object oriented development, Matisse's unique capabilities make it a natural solution for persistent objects. Its broad language support means that it can be used in just about any computing environment."

Unique Capabilities
Matisse was initially conceived from the ground-up to support mission-critical process control applications. Having been under continuous development for over 12 years, with Version 5.0 Matisse has matured into a full-featured, robust database management system with many unique capabilities.

Two of Matisse's unique capabilities are its adaptive object model and its intrinsic versioning architecture. The adaptive object model enables developers to dynamically and rapidly modify the database schema-classes or properties can be added or deleted while the system is online.

The Matisse intrinsic versioning architecture ensures database recovery while avoiding the overhead of transaction log operations and administration. In a write-intensive environment with numerous users, Matisse shows an overwhelming performance advantage without the loss of database integrity, recovery, or programmability.

According to Doug Barry, Chair of the Object Data Management Group (ODMG), "The reappearance of Matisse, with its wide use of database standards, further supports the general adoption of standards in the area of object storage."

Media Contacts:
Claude Ezran
Matisse Software Inc.
claude@matisse.com