Relational Technology Inc, Alameda, California and Sun Microsystems Inc, Mountain View, have agreed to develop and distribute what they hope will become a new industry standard set of window-based application development and reporting tools for workstations. The aim is to develop a new generation of tools that take advantage of the windowing and mouse user interface of workstations to access information in a relational database without the need to use a query language. The solution to be offered by Relational and Sun will be based on an enhancement of Sun’s current SunSimplify product with the addition of new modules. It will have an open architecture and operate in conjunction with the underlying connectivity tools of the Ingres/Star relational database that support networking and distributed data management. The products will be available to operate with Ingres in both the Sun/Unix and DEC VAX/VMS environments. Relational will distribute both versions, while Sun will distribute the Sun/Unix version only. Versions for multiple operating environments and database systems are planned for other vendors’ hardware and software later.
