Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!apple!voder!blia!blipyramid!mike
From: mike@blipyramid.BLI.COM (Mike Ubell)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: Data Base Machines
Message-ID: <71@blipyramid.BLI.COM>
Date: 15 Sep 88 17:35:25 GMT
References: <21755@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Organization: Britton Lee, Inc.
Lines: 22

By my definition a database machine is a system that has been architected
specificly for database management tasks.  It may contain specialized
hardware or general hardware components in a system with special architectual
features to support dbms tasks.
The machine will include software to perform the dbms tasks.
The two companies who have been selling database machines the longest,
Teradata and Britton Lee, both use standard processors in their current
offerings with some specialized hardware in a total system architected
for DBMS.  Teradata has special interconnection bus that connects
many specialized 80x86 processor boards (up to 1k I believe).
The bus the patented Y-bus that acutally has active compenents that
can do data merging and I believe some concurancy control.
Britton Lee provides a family of systems with two or more specialized z8000
processor boards and an optional Data Base Accelerator which is a custom
logic search engine.
Our newest product uses a custom processor plus 68020 based I/O processors
connected to a large shared memory.
There have been many proposed, and some built, very specialized dbms
processors in the literature.

(The foregoing is not intended as a sales pitch, sorry if it comes across
as such).