Portfolio
Distributed DBMS: An Evaluation
Source: white paper Published: Nov 1990
This is a white paper prepared by George Schussel for Ashton Tate, the software company which invented the famous dBASE PC tool. While dBASE dominated the “data base” market on PC’s in the late 80’s, early 90’s, it was not a technology that could be evolved into a true DBMS engine. The company retained Schussel to help in complete an acquisition of software that was more capable for enterprise applications than dBASE.
The paper starts off with:
The market for modern distributed DBMS software started in 1987 with the announcement of INGRES-STAR, a distributed relational system from RTI of Alameda, California. Most of the original research on distributed database technology for relational systems took place at IBM Corporation in IBM‘s two principal California software laboratories, Almaden and Santa Theresa. The first widely discussed distributed relational experiment was a project called R-Star, developed within IBM‘s laboratories. It is because of IBM‘s early use of the word STAR m describing this technology that most vendors’ distributed database systems names have incorporated “STAR” in one form or in another.
Today, the market for distributed DBMS is almost entirely based on the SQL language and extensions. (Principal exceptions being Computer Associates with its distributed DATACOM, and Fox Software with its newly announced Fox Server.)
There are three broad segments to the market
1. True distributed DBMS
2. Distributed access (remote data access)
3. Client Server
