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VulcanDB

discontinued

by Visual Objects.Net · since 2012 · also known as Vulcan DB

Short-lived object-oriented mobile database engine for .NET from Visual Objects.Net (c. 2012-2016).

objectembedded libraryproprietarylegacy
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discontinued. Vendor and product gone by about 2016; vulcandb.com now hosts an unrelated site. Use LiteDB, Realm or ObjectBox instead.

Overview

VulcanDB was a commercial object-oriented database engine for the .NET environment, written in C# by Visual Objects.Net and positioned for mobile and desktop applications that wanted to persist .NET objects without an ORM. Very little technical documentation survives: the product site required JavaScript, its archived copies are sparse, and by 2017 the vulcandb.com domain had been taken over by an unrelated gambling site. dbdb.io dates the product from 2012 to 2016. Treat it as a historical entry only; LiteDB, Realm or ObjectBox are the maintained options for embedded object storage in .NET.

Embedded / in-processMobile & offline

Strengths & trade-offs

Strengths

  • +Native .NET object persistence without ORM mapping (as marketed)
  • +Small footprint aimed at mobile devices

Trade-offs

  • −Discontinued with no remaining downloads or documentation
  • −Closed source; nothing to self-maintain

Great for

  • +Historical reference in surveys of .NET object databases
  • +Identifying legacy apps built on it

Think twice for

  • −Any new project

Capabilities

Native or official first-party support · 1 of 25 tracked

✓Durable persistence
–Transactions
–Joins
–Secondary indexes
–Full-text search
–Vector search
–Geospatial
–JSON
–Change data capture
–Triggers
–Stored procedures
–Materialized views
–TTL / expiry
–Pub/Sub
–Columnar storage
–In-memory
–Compression
–Encryption at rest
–Role-based access
–Time travel
–Branching
–Online schema changes
–Streaming ingest
–Offline sync
–Runs in WebAssembly

Scale & consistency

Comfortable data size
Small · ≤ 100 GB
Horizontal scaling
None
Multi-region
No
Transactions
Limited ACID
Consistency
Strong
Schema
Flexible
Architecture
Embedded
Query languages
.NET object API

Deployment

Self-hosted Vendor-managed cloud Serverless Embedded Edge Kubernetes operator

Ecosystem

apis & protocols.NET API
client languagesC#

Alternatives to VulcanDB

Compare all→
LiteDBDocument10.8

Serverless single-file NoSQL document database for .NET, in the spirit of SQLite.

vulcandb vs litedb →
Realm (Atlas Device SDK)Object25.2

Object-oriented mobile database whose MongoDB sync service is gone; the local engine survives as open source.

vulcandb vs realm →
ObjectBoxObject12.4

Fast on-device object database with built-in HNSW vector search and an optional commercial sync server.

vulcandb vs objectbox →
SiaqodbObject0.4

Embedded object and document database for .NET, Xamarin and Unity with LINQ queries; now inactive.

vulcandb vs siaqodb →
SQLiteRelational75.5

The in-process SQL engine that ships in every phone, browser and OS: one file, zero servers.

vulcandb vs sqlite →
ObjectDBObject9.3

Commercial object database for Java that implements JPA and JDO natively, with no ORM layer.

vulcandb vs objectdb →

VulcanDB FAQ

What is VulcanDB?

VulcanDB is an object database by Visual Objects.Net, first released in 2012. VulcanDB was a commercial object-oriented database engine for the .NET environment, written in C# by Visual Objects.Net and positioned for mobile and desktop applications that wanted to persist .NET objects without an ORM. Very little technical documentation survives: the product site required JavaScript, its archived copies are sparse, and by 2017 the vulcandb.com domain had been taken over by an unrelated gambling site. dbdb.io dates the product from 2012 to 2016. Treat it as a historical entry only; LiteDB, Realm or ObjectBox are the maintained options for embedded object storage in .NET.

Is VulcanDB open source?

No. VulcanDB is proprietary, closed-source software. License: Commercial.

Does VulcanDB support ACID transactions?

Partly. VulcanDB offers limited ACID guarantees (for example, single-record or single-partition transactions), with strong consistency.

Does VulcanDB scale horizontally?

VulcanDB does not scale horizontally; it runs on a single node, so you scale it up rather than out. It is comfortable at small scale (≤ 100 GB).

How can I run VulcanDB?

You can self-host it and embed it in your application.

What is VulcanDB best for?

VulcanDB is a strong fit for historical reference in surveys of .NET object databases and identifying legacy apps built on it. Think twice for any new project.

What are the best alternatives to VulcanDB?

Common alternatives to VulcanDB include LiteDB, Realm (Atlas Device SDK), ObjectBox, Siaqodb and SQLite. The right choice depends on your workload, scale and hosting; WhichDB's smart match ranks them against your requirements.

Is VulcanDB still maintained?

VulcanDB is discontinued. Vendor and product gone by about 2016; vulcandb.com now hosts an unrelated site. Use LiteDB, Realm or ObjectBox instead.

How popular is VulcanDB?

VulcanDB has little measurable public adoption today, so it ranks near the bottom of the WhichDB Score.