High Performance DBMS and Information Retrieval Systems

Introduction This will review some current industry solutions for high performance Database Management Systems (DBMS) and Information Retrieval (IR) solutions. Although numerous academic prototypes exist, we will focus on software that is currently released or scheduled for release within the next three to six months. Our focus will be on products that support the relational model and run on parallel architectures. The relational model first proposed in 1970, is now well established. Commercial DBMS solutions have been widely available since the mid-80's, so at this point it is relatively easy to find experienced application developers as well as commercial applications that run on many of these relational systems. However, most commercial DBMS on current machines were built to support business applications. To support large, scientific applications, it will probably be necessary to employ multiprocessors to obtain good run-time performance. Using a relational database syste