Austin, Texas-based UniSQL Inc has come out with what is claimed to be the world’s first heterogeneous database management system supporting both relational and object-oriented working. The UniSQL/M Multidatabase System, which the company first talked about back at UniForum in January and was due earlier this year, is said to enable Unix users to unify the schemas of various distributed multi-vendor databases into a single homogeneous database schema accessible through SQL/M’s object-oriented query language. Users can represent relational data as standard relational tables which are fully accessible via SQL or as object-oriented classes with full support for methods, composition, inheritance, encapsulation and polymorphism. A key feature is the system’s automatic two-phase commit support for distributed transactions spanning multiple heterogeneous databases that support it. SQL/M is integrated with the company’s other products, the UniSQL/X database and the UniSQL/4GE application development environment tools for a complete application-enabling system. SQL/M is available for beta testing on Sparc machines with Ingres 6.4 and UniSQL/X DBMS 1.2. When generally available in January, it should support IBM’s RS/6000. Oracle, Sybase and DB2 implementations should follow. Future versions will support Informix, IMS from IBM Corp and RMS from Digital Equipment Corp. A single-user licence begins at $4,000 including education. Meanwhile, the company expects to flesh out its next-generation product offerings with UniSQL/4GE ObjectMaster, an object-oriented rapid application development and prototyping tool that allows users to develop customised re-usable graphical user interface-based multimedia-enabled applications. It is available for early testing on Sparc machines and should become generally available in April supporting RS/6000s as well. ObjectMaster provides inherent support for various concurrency control protocols, data drill-down algorithms, multimedia data access, advanced inter-window message passing and integration with existing non-UniSQL tools, applications and network services. It includes both an ObjectMaster Editor for non-programmers to build graphical applications and an ObjectMaster Application Folder that acts as a central repository for application modules that can be re-used, recombined or extended to build additional application prototypes and ultimately components in production applications. A single-user licence begins at $1,800. UniSQL is funded through to 1994 via an research and development agreement with the $2,000m-a-year systems integrator NTT Data Communications Systems Corp.
