History of OpenLink Software

• 1992 Company founded (as PAL Consulting) by Kingsley Idehen
• 1993 Shipped first ODBC functionality on non-Windows platforms, Universal DataBase Connectivity (UDBC); name changed to OpenLink Software
• 1995 Shipped iODBC, the first ODBC Driver Manager for non-Windows platforms
• 1998 Acquired full rights to Kubl, which evolved into the Virtuoso Universal Server; Orri Erling joined staff
• 1998 Shipped Virtuoso 1.0, including Virtual Database / Federated Database / Hybrid Data Sever Functionality
• 2000 Shipped Virtuoso 1.5, adding a Validating XML Parser (supporting XML Schema), XSLT processor, SQL-to-XML transformation, XQuery, XPath, WebDAV support, and a native XML datatype
• 2001 Shipped Virtuoso 2.0, adding
  • Execution of native or third party SQL Stored Procedures over HTTP
  • Execution of native or third party SQL Stored Procedures via SOAP (by publishing SQL Stored Procedures as WSDL and SOAP compliant Web Services)
  • Proxy Generation for third party Web Services
  • Exposure of saved SQL, SQL-to-XML, XQuery, and XPath queries as Web Services
• 2001 Shipped Virtuoso 3.0, adding
  • DBMS hosting of the Java, Microsoft .NET CLR, and Mono runtime environments
  • User Defined Types (UDT) support with implementation in SQL, Java or .NET
  • Use of UDTs for abstracting web services, generating a UDT from a WSDL.
  • SQL Stored Procedures extensibility via code associated with hosted runtimes
  • Dynamic Language & Web page hosting for PHP, ASP.NET, JSP, Python, Perl, and Ruby (a recent addition)
  • Procedure Views (Table Valued Functions in SQL Server and Table Functions in Oracle)
  • Improved Cost based Distributed Query Optimizer for handling heterogeneous SQL joins
  • Bi-Directional Transaction Replication
  • XA-based 2-Phase Commit for Distributed Transactions
• 2006 Shipped OpenLink Data Spaces 1.0, incorporating
  • Web Application Framework
  • Weblog Publishing Platform
  • RSS/Atom/RDF Feed Aggregator
  • Photo Sharing system
  • Discussion Server
  • Wiki Engine
  • BPEL Process Manager (application layer above the in-built BPEL core)
  • Unified Storage (that includes automatic metadata extraction and resource classification using RDFS and OWL)
  • Social Networking Framework
• 2006 Shipped Virtuoso 4.0, forking Open Source (no Virtual DBMS features) and Closed Source (including VDBMS features) editions
• 2006 Shipped OpenLink ODBC Adapter for Ruby on Rails / Active Record
• 2006 Shipped OpenLink AJAX Toolkit 1.0
• 2007 Shipped Virtuoso 4.5, adding
  • RDF Mapping of relational data.
  • Bitmap index support
  • Engine enhancements including automatic background compaction, better SMP behavior with shorter critical sections, fixes in transaction logic and more.
• 2007 Shipped Virtuoso 5.0, adding
  • Full Text Indexing of Literal Objects in SPARQL Queries (this includes the magic predicate "bif:contains")
  • Subclass and Subproperty Support (Inferencing)
  • SPARQL Aggregate Functions
  • SPARUL support (SPARQL Inserts, Updates, and Deletions)
  • SPARQL Endpoint ("/sparql") is equipped with in-built RDF Middleware that enables non-RDF Data Sources (e.g., (X)HTML Pages, Microformats embedded in (X)HTML, and Web Services [e.g., Googlebase, Flickr, Del.icio.us and others]) to be treated as bona fide SPARQL Graph URIs
  • Improved Support of XML Schema Type System
  • Enhanced SPARQL to Relational Mapping (RDF VIEWs of SQL Data)