Abstract

Many very large data bases (VLDB) currently exist in industry, business, and government. To access, update, protect, and in general manage these VLDB require an enormous amount of computing power both in terms of hardware and software. A field that has received considerable research and development attention over the last 20 years is data base machines. The main objective of a data base machine is to improve greatly the performance of data base functions by maximum utilization of parallelism and hardware advances. While commercial data base machines exist, their impact has not been so great as originally expected. Unlike other fields of computing, in data base management considerable data are processed only to be discarded later. This coupled with large data volume (gigabytes to terabytes) mandate a storage hierarchy, and magnetic disks form the backbone of this hierarchy. However, the data rates from magnetic disks are only of the order of 3 Mbytes/s, which severely limits the performance of such systems. On the other hand, the potential data rates from optical disks are of the order of 300 Mbytes/s using multibeam reads. These data rates can easily be accommodated with optical interconnections for input to an optical processor. This optical processor must be able to perform rudimentary data base operations on the data prior to transforming it to electronic form, which insures that much richer data are input to the electronic computer. The optical storage system, interconnections, and optical processor form the basis of an optical data base machine. The underlying issues involved in the conceptual design of such a machine are discussed.

© 1987 Optical Society of America