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From: jas@rtech.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: Database Machines (was: minor plug for Britton Lee)
Message-ID: <863@rtech.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 29-May-87 00:22:36 EDT
Article-I.D.: rtech.863
Posted: Fri May 29 00:22:36 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 30-May-87 10:29:38 EDT
References: <2700@blia.BLI.COM> <851@rtech.UUCP> <2042@utah-gr.UUCP>
Reply-To: jas@rtech.UUCP (Jim Shankland)
Organization: Relational Technology, Alameda CA
Lines: 40

Thought I'd post a few thoughts on database machines to try to move the
discussion away from the meta-topic of what constitutes unacceptable
advertising.  In the following paragraphs, "vanilla" means "general
purpose" (not "unremarkable"), and "DBMS" means the DBMS proper, not
including user interfaces.

It seems to me that database machines try to achieve superior
performance in two different ways:  (1) by designing special-purpose
hardware that can do database-intensive things much faster than vanilla
hardware; and (2) by eliminating the vanilla operating system, allowing
the DBMS software to run directly on the hardware (a.k.a. writing a
special-purpose OS that will support only the DBMS software).

Personally, I'm a good deal more skeptical about (1) than about (2).
Special-purpose hardware has high leverage in some application areas:
4 x 4 matrix multiplication hardware is pretty handy for doing
real-time 3-D transformations, for example.  I'm not convinced that
DBMS software has similar, high-enough-leverage operations.  While
Britton-Lee tries to develop special-purpose hardware that does some
subset of the data manager's job so fast that the ENTIRE data manager
runs 10 times faster, the vanilla hardware vendors are building
computers that do EVERYTHING faster.  My money says the special-purpose
hardware people are going to have a hard time keeping up with Sun, DEC,
and the rest of the vanilla hardware vendors.

(2) seems more promising.  Lots of vanilla OS's are lousy platforms for
DBMS implementation (UNIX is certainly not an exception).  Strictly off
the cuff, I could imagine a 100% performance improvement to be had by
implementing a DBMS on a special-purpose OS (or maybe on a vanilla OS
that provided the right services, if such a beast existed), instead of
on UNIX.

Comments?

(Oh, yes:  these are my personal opinions only.)
-- 
Jim Shankland
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