The DBC/1012 Data Base Computer was a
database machine introduced by
Teradata
Teradata Corporation is an American software company that provides cloud database and Analytics, analytics-related software, products, and services. The company was formed in 1979 in Brentwood, California, as a collaboration between researchers a ...
Corporation in 1984, as a back-end
data base management system for mainframe computers.
The DBC/1012 harnessed multiple
Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...
microprocessors, each with its own dedicated
disk drive, by interconnecting them with the Ynet switching network in a
massively parallel processing system.
The DBC/1012 was designed to manage databases up to one terabyte (1,000,000,000,000 characters) in size; "1012" in the name refers to "10 to the power of 12".
Major components included:
* Mainframe-resident software to manage users and transfer data
* Interface processor (IFP) - the hardware connection between the mainframe and the DBC/1012
* Ynet - a custom-built system interconnect that supported broadcast and sorting
* Access module processor (AMP) - the unit of parallelism: includes microprocessor, disk drive, file system, and database software
* System console and printer
* TEQUEL (TEradata QUEry Language) - an extension of
SQL
The DBC/1012 was designed to scale up to 1024 Ynet interconnected processor-disk units.
Rows of a
relation (table) were distributed by hashing on the primary
database index
A database index is a data structure that improves the speed of data retrieval operations on a database table at the cost of additional writes and storage space to maintain the index data structure. Indexes are used to quickly locate data withou ...
.
The DBC/1012 used a 474 megabyte Winchester disk drive with an average seek time of 18 milliseconds. The disk drive was capable of transferring data at 1.9 MB/s although in practice the sustainable data rate was lower because the IO pattern tended towards random access and transfer lengths of 8 to 12 kilobytes.
The processor cabinet was 60 inches high and 27 inches wide, weighed 450 pounds, and held up to 8 microprocessor units.
The storage cabinet was 60 inches high and 27 inches wide, weighed 625 pounds, and held up to 4 disk storage units.
The DBC/1012 preceded the advent of
redundant array of independent disks (RAID) technology, so data protection was provided by the "fallback" feature, which kept a logical copy of rows of a relation on different AMPs. The collection of AMPs that provided this protection for each other was called a
cluster. A cluster could have from 2 to 16 AMPs.
The product could be integrated with
optical disc drives. There were at least four models, marketed through about 1993.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dbc 1012
Mainframe computers
Teradata