Abstract

Databases have become an important aspect of our daily lives. We encounter them in such diverse fields as airline reservations, stock quotation systems, medical information systems, entertainment, sports and a host of other areas. Database management systems (DBMS) place considerable demands on current computing systems primarily because of the large size of the databases, the general functionality of the DBMS and the stringent time requirements for the retrieval of the data. The large size of the database dictates that secondary storage such as optical and magnetic disks be used and this leads to input/output data accessing difficulties since these memory types are on the order of one million times slower in access time than main memory technology. The diverse functionality of DBMS leads to systems with millions of lines of code that consume an enormous number of machine cycles. Add to this the near real time requirement for many applications and one has a system that is both I/O and compute bound.

© 1991 Optical Society of America