One of the many vendor meetings I postponed from ESC and took later over the telephone was one with Collin Bruce of Hitachi Embedded Systems. His basic pitch is that the Entier embedded database can enable a new level of search capability on converged devices. What's a converged device? The undistinguished cell phone sitting on my desk, for one: it's a phone, it's a camera, it's a video recorder, it's a sound re What’s a converged device? The undistinguished cell phone sitting on my desk, for one: it’s a phone, it’s a camera, it’s a video recorder, it’s a sound recorder, it’s a music player, it’s a Web browser, it’s a GPS, it’s a rat poison, it’s a toothpaste… OK, the last two were just to see if you were paying attention. Now, the fact is that most current cell phones, smart phones, and connected PDAs don’t do very well when it comes to searching. My cell phone organizes my music by genre, artist, album, and song, which is fine if I want to listen to Bohemian Rhapsody from A Night at the Opera by Queen, but not fine if all I can remember about what I want to hear is how it sounds and that it’s one of the gorgeous arias I keep hearing in unexpected contexts. (The aria I was hearing in my head is in fact Ombra mai fu from Xerxes by Handel, sometimes known as Handel’s Largo, even though it isn’t notated at largo; I have a fine performance on my phone’s music player by the late, great mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, published on her album of Handel Arias. The other gorgeous aria I keep hearing in unexpected contexts, including commercials on TV, is O mio babbino caro from Gianni Schicchi by Puccini.) My cell phone can find me a sushi restaurant in my zip code a number of ways, among which the most convenient (and least graphical) is probably to text “sushi 01810” to Google. It can’t easily find me the name of the Italian restaurant that’s a couple blocks off the highway on my way from here to Cambridge unless I remember the restaurant name, the street address, or at least the town it’s in, and it certainly has no idea how to coordinate the route it gives me to a location to what else is on that route.According to Bruce of Hitachi, Entier can do all that, and more. Entier started out as a project Hitachi did for Nissan to supply an embedded database for cars; it was released in the U.S. market just over a year ago. At this point, Entier can do a full-text search of a substantial database on a mobile handset in under a second, and has extensions to SQL that let it answer questions like “find me a song that sounds like late–era Beatles” or “find me a sushi restaurant within two blocks of the current GPS route”.What’s new in the current release of Entier is a level-locking mechanism to support efficient database access from multiple processes; a database partitioning scheme; a binary update utility; and improved complex word search. These augment the existing spatial search, conceptual search, incremental text search, and alias search features of the database. There’s a moderately obnoxious but informative flash demo about Entier here. Software Development