Tutorial on data base machines

The cost of the hardware components that make up modern day digital computers continues to drop at a rapid rate. Along with this cost reduction there exists a simultaneous increase in the number of components that one can place on an integrated circuit chip. This leads to what seems to be an ever decreasing cost of hardware combined with a continued increase in functional capability. When these improvements are coupled with the ever increasing costs of software, primarily caused by increased personnel costs, it becomes imperative to consider moving functions that are primarily executed in software, to hardware. One field that has received increased attention vis-a-vis movement of software functions to hardware is the database management field. Owing to size and complexity, managing databases becomes increasingly difficult. Over the past few years, increasing efforts have been expended in the study of new types of hardware called database machines which are designed solely for the purpose of managing data. This research has been driven by the decreasing cost of hardware and by the need for performance improvements due to increased database size and complexity and a maturing database theory.