In the old days at DEC one of the ways the Alpha processor was marketed was to use its 64bit addressing capability with a then huge "solid state" chunk of memory to load an entire database in memory...the performance was spectacular...but you had to buy the database e.g. Oracle or whatever to do this. In this case they are clearly bundling the cost of whatever SW development there was in the hardware cost...but its the "no software" message that is interesting...the next best thing is free software...so this may actually help open source.
J. On Fri, 2002-12-20 at 16:37, Tim Churches wrote: > Joseph Dal Molin wrote: > > > > Just ran across this interesting development...an alternative to > > software licenses and open source for that matter displayed at Comdex is > > hardware: > > > > http://www.calpont.com/go/products.html > > > > Link: http://www.gcn.com/21_34/news/20671-1.html > > > > Government Computer News > > 12/16/02; Vol. 21 No. 34 > > > > Small and wireless are hot trends > > > > By John Breeden II, Carlos A. Soto, and Thomas R. Temin > > GCN Staff > > > > Calpont Corp. showed > > > > a prototype of a radically different database management system in > > hardware. President Valerie Borthwick, a former Oracle Corp. executive, > > said the Rockwell, Texas, company?s Novare HDB promises a 100-fold > > increase in system performance and eliminates the complexity of the > > typical enterprise DBMS? layers of optimizing software. > > > > Ready next fall, Novare HDB will comprise an application server, a DBMS > > engine card and 112G of storage, all in a 19-inch rackmount card cage. > > It will emulate IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp. and Oracle databases plus a > > superset of a half-dozen languages based on Structured Query Language. > > No software licenses are required. > > A glance at their Web page reveals that this device uses SDRAM as its > primary storage - hence the "100-fold increase in system performance". > The 112GB storage mentioned above is all RAM! There seems to be > provision for optional SCSI disc-based secondary storage, and presumably > some mechanism for ensuring the data doesn't evaporate when the power > goes down... > > Tim C > -- +=======================================================+ | Joseph Dal Molin | E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | President | Web: http://www.e-cology.ca | | e-cology Corporation | Phone: 1.416.232.1206 | +=======================================================+
