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From: oysteing@idt.unit.no (Oystein Groevlen)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: The Rushmore Technology from FoxPro
Message-ID: <1991Jun1.165211.27480@ugle.unit.no>
Date: 1 Jun 91 16:52:11 GMT
Sender: news@ugle.unit.no
Reply-To: oysteing@idt.unit.no
Organization: Div. of CS & Telematics, Norwegian Institute of Technology
Lines: 42

A few months ago I got a demonstration of the 'revolutionary',
according to an ad from FoxPro, Rushmore Technology. I am interesting
in hearing some comments from people that have had some experience
with it.

From what I could see, the query performance was much better than what
I have experienced with ORACLE/INGRES, but we only got an limited
demonstration.

My impression was that the technology is based on some technique where
indexes occupy much less space than usual. Thus, it is possible to
index all fields of a table and keep all indexes in memory. This way
queries can be processed with a minimum of disk access. Is this your
impression, too?

I seem to remember reading on this group that FoxPro needs a lot of
memory. What happens if all indexes does not fit into memory? Is there
a significant decrease in performance?

The table used for the demonstration consisted of only character
fields. Does an index of an integer field take much more space than an
index of a character filed? As you probably know, you can usually
compress text much more than numbers (Huffman code, Tries etc.)

We only got a demonstration of selection from one table. How is the
performance on joins?

Do you think the Rushmore Technology is really revolutionary?

As memory gets cheaper, it will maybe be possible to store large
amounts of data in memory for faster query processing. This will
significantly increase the query performance. Do you think this will
cause great changes in the DBMS-market?

Thanks for any response. Please post to the net. If you prefer email I
will summarize to the net.

-- 
Oystein Groevlen 
Division of Computer Systems and Telematics 
The Norwegian Institute of Technology The University of Trondheim
Email: oysteing@idt.unit.no