Database Machines and Appliances
In the 1970s and 1980s attempts were made to build database systems with integrated hardware and software. The underlying philosophy was that such integration would provide higher performance at lower cost. Examples were IBM System/38, the early offering of Teradata, and the Britton Lee, Inc. database machine. Another approach to hardware support for database management was ICL's CAFS accelerator, a hardware disk controller with programmable search capabilities. In the long term these efforts were generally unsuccessful because specialized database machines could not keep pace with the rapid development and progress of general-purpose computers. Thus most database systems nowadays are software systems running on general-purpose hardware, using general-purpose computer data storage. However this idea is still pursued for certain applications by some companies like Netezza and Oracle (Exadata).
Read more about this topic: Data Maintenance, History, Evolution of Database and DBMS Technology
Famous quotes containing the word machines:
“If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.”
—John Updike (b. 1932)