Testimonials

Panther Studio Corporations' Dean DePue on Valentina COM

We are using mostly VB.NET in the development of our products and have been integrating Valentina COM. VCOM is very powerful and lightning fast. It is just what we need. Even in the Demo mode, we can still load the database in that ten minute time frame with more than 100,000 records and sort and select on them with ease. We have a lot of experience with SQL Server, Oracle and Sybase, so we know what we are doing with RDBM’s. And Valentina offers the features, speed and robustness that we need in our products. VCOM is extremely fast! I love it! The difference from what I was using before, which was Access, is phenomenal!

Soundminer's Justin Drury on Valentina for Cocoa and REALbasic

I’ve been using Valentina since 2000 first with Realbasic and now with Cocoa. What has always struck me as impressive is not just the database engine but the dedication and excitement the folks at Paradigma have for their product. I had moved to Apple’s Cocoa framework about a year ago and had to use alternate databases(SqLite/MySQL) while Valentina was prepared. Recently I have been able to start integrating V4CC(Valentina for Cocoa) into my apps, and frankly its THE most exciting addition to my development environment! I can use Valentina’s RAM databases with the same ease as CoreFoundation’s datatypes with all the speed and efficiency that we have come to respect out of Valentina. With its objective C interface and built-in binding support, Valentina for Cocoa (with xCode) is an incredible RAD tool. I had been using CoreData with both its XML store and Sql Lite store and while that was fine for a few thousand records it quickly started to bog down and I missed the ability to tinker under the hood. Within an hour I had whipped together a prototype using Valentina and was awed by its power. I’m again able to access hundreds of thousands of records with lightning speed and with its mature SQL support I’m able to manipulate the data with ease.

Synchromedia's Marcus Bointon on Macromedia Director

I developed a kiosk project using Paradigma's Valentina database in Macromedia Director (not exactly renowned as a speedy environment), but on a P3/600 with 384 Mb RAM I imported and indexed 20 million records (about 1.2 Gb) inside two hours. I thought I'd do a benchmark with Access 2k - it crashed after 11 hours of importing (not even indexing). Valentina did 5-term OR searches in under 0.1 sec on the entire dataset, Access (using only 10% of the data) clocked in at about 13 sec. So Valentina was 1300 times faster!!! Does anyone else need convincing that Access is really not a good way to go?

Florian Bogeschdorfer, owner and lead programmer of memedia, www.memedia.de

I started out with Valentina in 2003. My old Macromedia Director database technology had reached its limits and Valentina was the only alternative. But what started out as a necessity soon turned into pure joy programming with Valentina. Today the 3 developers of my company work with Valentina Client/Server even in languages where there are alternatives like in .NET, php, java and more. But we prefer Valentina for 4 main reasons: 1. speed (have you seen anything faster?), 2. stability (my databases never crashed), 3. support (I have never seen a faster and better support) and 4. flexibility. This probably has become the most important reason for us, since now we can combine applications from .NET, Director, Java and more, using the exactly same database in an inexpensive, fast and low-resources-consuming way. What I am missing with Valentina? A Flash client :-)

Sonny Software's Jon Ashwell

Our application requires storage and rapid retrieval of large amounts of text. We decided on REALbasic for the interface, but the database engine it provides is inadequate. After trying several possible solutions we settled on Valentina. Valentina is flexible and very, very fast. Indexed searches of many MB of data are nearly instantaneous. But the other reason we chose Valentina is that the support provided by Ruslan Zasukhin and his growing band of developers is outstanding. Valentina is Ruslan's vision, and he is dedicated to its continued growth and improvement. Because he is a labor of love, he is extremely responsive to questions and suggestions, and aggressively strives to make Valentina the premier cross-platform database solution. When I run into problems (usually my fault) Ruslan is quick to help. There is also a sophisticated community of Valentina users who are happy to provide advice and even examples to fellow developers. I should mention that not only is Valentina first class, given the unlimited support at the highest level (even into the wee hours), its price can't be beat. Choosing Valentina is a decision we have never regretted.

Developer Frank Schima on Valentina for REALbasic

I am a very happy user of Valentina. No other database I have used, and I have used many, can match the speed of Valentina. When version-2 was released, I quickly migrated my projects to use it. I like many of the new features such as Unicode support, SQL92 compliance, and the unique features that only appear in Valentina. For instance, there is a sum_linked() function that can replace the use of a SQL join or another SQL sub-Select call. I also like that it supports some neat SQL99 features such as the -> operator which allows me to use fewer joins in my SQL Selects. Since Valentina is supported on nearly all platforms and programming environments, I am confident that if I switch to another development environment, I can keep my database files and SQL code intact. The support for Valentina is top notch. The developers are easy to contact. I often get bug fixes within a day or two - even on weekends. Many of my feature requests have been implemented too.

SIS Ägarservice AB's Totte Alm on Valentina C++ SDK

Almost 6 years ago, we decided that we needed to remove the old DB-Vista III database and the RAM database we we're using. The data, share holder information, was received in many ways, and was stored on the users computers as documents, that could be opened by the client application. We first looked at NeoAccess, but that track was a dead end, and by pure coincidence, I stumbled upon Valentina. I downloaded Valentina, and started to code up, and in a few days, I had come where I were with NeoAccess after a month. So, We build the first line analysis, and import system around Valentina, and we use it still as embedded server, where the user opens up "documents" on their computer, which are Valentina databases. Valentina is fast, the API is pretty easy to use and the support has so far been exceptional, but any testimonial without any complains is probably faked, so I want to say that thread support is what I've been missing on Mac OS X so far, but that seems to change with Valentina 2. We're now in the phase of moving to valentina for the suite of applications we have for SIS Ägarservice AB. Every application is unique, and so is the developer needs, but the way we use Valentina, as an embedded database engine to ensure fast searching and browsing of document level data, it's the best of the best.

Developer Ed Kleban on Valentina for REALbasic

Flexibility is the compelling hallmark of the Valentina programming interface. SQL-purists can code entirely in SQL; Code-skittish designers can build an entire database with the VS GUI app; Speed-demons can surpass many SQL performance limitations and use efficient set theoretic functions for accelerating many simple queries; Object oriented enthusiasts can use and build upon the language-specific class interfaces to expand the interface in powerful ways that offer even greater performance and storage improvements; And efficiency aficionados such as myself, who share the Valentina Author's compelling "need for speed", can combine all of the above techniques as appropriate to achieve a truly stellar level of performance and compactness. Power in programming, as in all endeavors, comes from choosing the best tool for the job at hand. Valentina's Power is based in the large number of tools it provides. The ability to transparently switch between in-memory, local-disk based, and client/server implementations for a database is wonderful. I take full advantage of foreign-key, object-pointer, and binary-link relationships to optimize structures for expected high-volume usage patterns. I have added hash-encoding fields, I have created custom field accessor classes that transparently execute a simple SQL query only upon need, I have implement genetic search algorithms. And I relish both the inherent flexibility that Valentina offers me to perform optimizations such as these as well as the incredibly fine technical support that assists me in figuring out how to do so.

FoxWerk's Andy Fuchs on Multi-Platform Computing with Valentina

Some years ago I was dreaming of a flexible and fast database which is able to store different types of data which then can be accessed through various APIs and Platforms. None of the databases I knew of offered only parts of this functionality. And talking to database-developers was practically impossible... But there was one company who listened and came up with the most powerful, fast and flexible (local) database-kernel I ever worked with. Valentina gave me all the power to realize some big projects on CD-ROM or DVD-ROM which were impossible to maintain before. It handled any amount of data I needed, very fast. And I was finally able to fill the content of the database (in Realbasic and/or AppleScript) using standard-editorial software (like Filemaker Pro) and use the same(!) database in a multimedia production (using Macromedia Director) without any modification. It saved me so much money and time that even if I had to pay 10 times the current licenses, it would still have been a good deal.

DingoBlue's Paul Schaap on Valentina 1.22 Application with Applescript

I have benchmarked Valentina 1.2.2 on MacOS 8.5.1 against MySQL 3.22.22 on Linux PPC R4.1. For the test I used G3/266 with 96Mb RAM. The Database has two relational tables one with 459,207 records and the other with 708,633, weighing in at 266 MB of database.

Test MySQL Valentina Relational search retrieving 1,342 rows 2 minutes 14 seconds Indexing primary key 459,207 4 minutes 20 seconds Sorting and Exporting 459,207 rows of two unindexed fields 13 minutes 2 minutes Sorting 459,207 indexed rows 3 minutes 6 seconds

Considering the proven performance of MySQL, Valentina demonstrates an incredible speed improvement for major DBMS operations! Additionally, the developers of Valentina have proven and succeeded in their commitment to further improvements. This an extremely promising product.

Practice to Pass's Gunnar Swan on Valentina for Director

We have had our software on the marketplace for 17 months now, and doing quite well. We have very few support issues, and NOT ONE ... Zero ... no issue has involved Valentina. Thank you so much for your fast and stable database product. We love it!

Praxisworks' Erik D. Mueller-Harder on Valentina for REALbasic

Valentina is an excellent product: it is fast, flexible, fast, robust, fast, and cross-platform. Oh, and did I mention that it was fast? Paradigma’s support is truly amazing. Valentina is very full-featured (regular expressions, internal pointers for table relations, automatic caching, etc.) – and new features are being added all the time. Valentina makes a perfect back-end database for many different development environments, and yet you can always turn to its own GUI for immediate access to your data. Valentina pleases me!

GMX's Carsten Friehe on Valentina for REALbasic

I am using Valentina for REALbasic and can simply say that it is great. It is fast, simple to use and integrates perfectly into REALbasic. It has all the features I need from a database And now the part which is a very important reason for me to chose Valentina. The support is really great. If you have a problem it will mostly be solved in one or two days. If something important is missing, it will be implemented in short time.