London-based software developer Protek Ltd has at last announced its Unix version of the Tekbase relational database aimed at scientists, engineers and others using large arrays of data, promised back at the end of last year (CI No 798). Tekbase was originally designed for Hewlett-Packard Series 200/300 hardware, a situation that constrained sales, according to managing director Michael Berman. The new version will initially run on Hewlett-Packard HP/UX systems, but Berman says that a wide range of Unix systems will soon be supported. A requester/server architecture with full central record locking, similar to that used on Oracle, has been implemented to support multi-user capability for up to 32 users and networking: Tekbase can be run on a central system and accessed from machines running Basic or Pascal, a mix that enables automatic testing equipment, process control and instrument control systems to input data directly to the database for storing, analysis and output. Arrays of up to 128,000 elements of integer, real or complex data can be stored, and Tekbase includes a specially designed query language, TQL, for simplified data access and manipulation with trigonometrical, mathematical, statistical and analytic functions. Graphics and reports can be generated from the data. Cost is UKP3,000 for a two user system, with the programmatic interface, signal analysis and statistics package optional.
