Odysseus/m: a High-Performance ORDBMS Tightly-Coupled with IR Features

Conventional ORDBMS vendors provide extension mechanisms for adding user-defined types and functions to their own DBMSs. Here, the extension mechanisms are implemented using a high-level interface. We call this technique loose-coupling. The advantage of loose-coupling is that it is easy to implement. However, it is not preferable for implementing new data types and operations in large databases when high Performance is required. In this paper, we propose to use the notion of tight-coupling to satisfy this requirement. In tight-coupling, new data types and operations are integrated into the core of the DBMS engine. Thus, they are supported in a consistent manner with high performance. This tight-coupling architecture is being used to incorporate information retrieval(IR) features and spatial database features into the Odysseus/IR ORDBMS that has been under development at KAIST/AITrc. In this paper, we introduce Odysseus/IR and explain its tightly-coupled IR features (U.S. patented). We then demonstrate a web search engine that is capable of managing 20 million web pages in a non-parallel configuration using Odysseus/IR.