Interested in providing full-text search along with fast, lightweight data management for your Android applications? The new Perst 4.0 open source, object-oriented embedded database system brings native full-text search capability to Android, and builds on this feature to provide a sample search engine application for contact data residing on mobile phones.

To provide search, the database stores an inverse index of keywords, with parsing and stemming of indexed text performed either by user-defined code or by Perst’s default simple parser and stemmer. The feature supports logical operators and calculates relevance of search results to a query.

The new sample application for Android, ContactsIndex, stores and indexes contact information, and could be extended to provide search capabilities for PDF, word processing, HTML and other stored files. The example application is included with complete source code in the Perst 4.0 for Java distribution.

Also new in Perst 4.0 for Android: support for non-native objects, which expands the scope of the embedded database to benefit a larger variety of application types.

The Perst embedded database system helps developers create small-footprint embedded Java applications for Android that are fast, reliable, and cost-effective to develop and maintain.

The complete announcement of what’s new in Perst 4.0 is available at

http://www.mcobject.com/perst_v4_for_mobile_phones

Below some screenshots of the ContactsIndex demo application, running on the latest Android emulator.

An exciting news today, Versant Corporation (Nasdaq: VSNT), a leading provider of specialized data management software, has acquired the db4o business effective December 1. We have previously announced db4o, the first object oriented database solution that was available for Android.

Christof Wittig, CEO Servo Software, Inc. (formerly db4objects, Inc.), told OHM in email :

This will give Servo Software, Inc. (formerly db4objects, Inc.) the opportunity to focus entirely on its ground-breaking Servo user data management solution. Servo remains in stealth-mode until the announcement of its first deployed service in 2009, with several of the world’s leading wireless service providers and a number of leading wireless device manufacturers.

In the transaction, Versant acquired the assets of db4objects’ database business, including db4objects’ database software, related customer and community relationships, trademarks, websites and other intellectual property. Carl Rosenberger, founder and CTO of db4objects, Inc., has joined Versant as Chief Software Architect, db4o product line, together with several other personnel who managed the db4o business for db4objects.

The db4o business acquired by Versant provides a highly popular object database software native to Java and .NET under both open source and commercial licenses to a large open-source community of approximately 50,000 registered members in 190 countries. With some 2 million downloads since 2001, the db4o business has established the relevance and remarkable efficiency of the open-source model. The feature-rich db4o technology has been deployed by many innovative companies.

Joining Versant’s larger database business will give the db4o solution increased community presence worldwide, as well as an expanded field engineering and support organization. With these additional resources, it is expected that the db4o business will be best positioned to reach its full potential and further increase its footprint as one of the major database technologies.

You can read the full press release here http://getservo.com/open/Press.aspx