Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!ginosko!uunet!lotus!esegue!johnl
From: johnl@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us (John R. Levine)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Database Machines
Message-ID: <1989Oct10.043710.1586@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us>
Date: 10 Oct 89 04:37:10 GMT
References: <785@ecrcvax.UUCP>
Reply-To: johnl@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us (John R. Levine,x9650)
Organization: Segue Software, Cambridge MA
Lines: 24

In article <785@ecrcvax.UUCP> kfw@ecrcvax.UUCP (Kam-Fai Wong) writes:
>	I am seeking for information on commercial database machines. I've
>	read about the Britton-Lee IDM, the Intel iDBP and the Teradata
>	DBC. ...

I was pretty much the only OEM user of the iDBP.  I wrote a compiler for
its command language (a tokenized relational algebra with a lot of other
stuff) which either ran standalone or embedded in C, and a few demo
applications, a text searcher and a QBE subset.  The logical design was
great, but the implementation by a bunch of iRMX jocks left a lot to
be desired.  They never finished it and withdrew it before it shipped.

The design was basically relational, except that you could store pointers
either to precompute joins or to implement oldthink architectures, and
you could also have pointers to regions of unstructured data for text or
images.  I liked the design better than the IDM because it let you
manipulate your data in flexible ways; it was easy for example to get
each record in file A followed by the records in file B that are joined
to it, without having to generate a joined file and retrieve the A record
for every B record, stuff like that.
-- 
John R. Levine, Segue Software, POB 349, Cambridge MA 02238, +1 617 864 9650
johnl@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us, {ima|lotus|spdcc}!esegue!johnl
Massachusetts has over 100,000 unlicensed drivers.  -The Globe