Garnet as gemstones. The gemstone varieties occur in shades of green, red, yellow, and orange. In the US it is known as the birthstone for January. It is the state mineral of Connecticut, New York's gemstone, and star garnet (garnet with rutile asterisms) is the state gemstone of Idaho. Garnet sand is a good abrasive, and a common replacement for silica sand in sand blasting. Alluvial garnet grains which are rounder are more suitable for such blasting treatments. Mixed with very high pressure water, garnet is used to cut steel and other materials in water jets. For water jet cutting, garnet
Gemstone (database) of VMware, announced it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire GemStone. On May 2, 2013, GemTalk Systems acquired the GemStone/S platform from Pivotal Software (the EMC and VMware spin-off).. Gemfire remained with Pivotal's Big Data division. The product is available standalone but is also integrated into its Cloud Foundry PaaS as "Pivotal Cloud Cache". GemStone builds on the programming language Smalltalk. GemStone systems serve as mission-critical applications. GemStone frameworks still see some interest for web services and service-oriented architectures. A recent revival of interest in Smalltalk has occurred as a result of its use to generate JavaScript for