Data base machines

• Authors: P. Bruce Berra
• Venue: ACM SIGIR Forum
• Year: 1977

In the past few years there has been increased emphasis in the use of new and different hardware in the data base management field. This has given rise to an interesting area of research called data base machines. The objectives are to implement many of the traditional software data base management functions in hardware in order to increase performance and capability.The reasons for increased research activity in data base machines are many fold. The modern digital computer with all its power still executes only a single instruction at a time al beit with a few exceptions. Since the digital computer was primarily designed for numeric applications, the ratio of useful instructions to overhead instructions tends to be very low in non-numeric applications such as data base management. There is an increasing body of knowledge that indicates that parallelism and addressing by content can be used to advantage in such data base management functions as retrieval and update. The above reasons coupled with the fact that software and personnel costs continued to rise while hardware costs continue to decrease makes it imperative that researchers find new solutions to the data base management problem that take maximum advantage of hardware architecture and technology.In this paper a brief review of current efforts in data base machines is presented. A review of the more important functions performed in data base management is given first. This is followed by a brief discussion of mini computer implementations. Then a review of some of the current efforts in data base machines is given. Finally, a few thoughts are presented on future trends.