Enscribe is the native hierarchical database in the commercial HP NonStop (Tandem) servers. It is designed for

fault tolerance Fault tolerance is the ability of a system to maintain proper operation despite failures or faults in one or more of its components. This capability is essential for high-availability, mission-critical, or even life-critical systems. Fault t ...

and

scalability Scalability is the property of a system to handle a growing amount of work. One definition for software systems specifies that this may be done by adding resources to the system. In an economic context, a scalable business model implies that ...

and is currently offered by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The product was originally developed by Tandem Computers. Tandem was acquired by

Compaq Compaq Computer Corporation was an American information technology, information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced some of the first IBM PC compati ...

in 1997. Compaq was later acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2002. When

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company. It was founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939 in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California ...

split in 2015 into HP Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Enscribe and the rest of the NonStop product line went to Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The product primarily is used for online transaction processing and is tailored for organizations that need high availability and

for their database system. Typical users of the product are stock exchanges, telecommunications, POS, and bank ATM networks. Somewhat similar to Record Management Services on

OpenVMS OpenVMS, often referred to as just VMS, is a multi-user, multiprocessing and virtual memory-based operating system. It is designed to support time-sharing, batch processing, transaction processing and workstation applications. Customers using Op ...

platforms, some Enscribe features are: * Five disk file structures: unstructured, key-sequenced, queue, entry-sequenced, and relative * Partitioned (multiple-volume) files * Multiple-key access to records * Relational access among files (where a field value from one file is used as a key to access a data record in another file) * Optional automatic maintenance of all keys * Optional key compression in key-sequenced data or index blocks * Support of transaction auditing through the Transaction Management Facility (TMF/MP). TMF is the main functional component of the NonStop Transaction Manager/MP product. * Optional compression of audit-checkpoint records * Record level locking and file level locking * Cache buffering * Optional sequential block buffering * Waited and Nowaited I/Os (multi-threading of I/O calls by the programmer) The NonStop OS Guardian APIs or the utility FUP (File Utility Program) can be used to work with Enscribe files. A "convert" utility was provided by Tandem to aid in converting Enscribe files to NonStop SQL files, when desired. Many of the applications developed in HP NonStop servers (often critical ones) run on Enscribe databases.

History

Enscribe is designed to run effectively on parallel computers, adding functionality for distributed data, distributed execution, and distributed transactions. First released in the early 1980s, and initially carrying an added charge until it was included with the operating system, the product became one of the few hierarchical data base systems that scales almost linearly with the number of processors in the machine: adding a second CPU to an existing server almost exactly doubled its performance.

References

{{reflist HP software

History

See also

References