The Unix version of AT&T Global Information Solutions’ Teradata massively parallel back-end database server, which is due in November on the Series 3500 symmetric multiprocessing servers and the promised 3700 massively parallel processing equivalent, is functionally the same as the proprietary implementation. The difference is in the performance of migrated features. Some run three times faster, some 30 times, the company claimed. Conversion for users is basically a dump and restore operation. AT&T said it has migrated what remains the world’s most widely-used parallel database system to Unix to reduce future development costs and to take advantage of Unix features such as memory management and large memory sizes. It hasn’t decided whether it will put the thing up under other Unixes yet. The implementation wasn’t a huge recoding operation, AT&T claims, just a recompile under Unix, but it has done extensive work to achieve parallelism through a combination of hardware and software mechanisms. Multiple instances of the database can be run as subsets on a shared nothing memory – generic SQL gets thrown at the parsing engine which distributes it across the multiple instances. With this port, AT&T has taken the proprietary parsing engine and implemented it as a Unix process. The Ynet interconnect is implemented in software. Ynet sits in memory on a symmetric multiprocessing Unix node, enabling multiple copies of the database to run as if on a parallel processor. Each virtual processor is linked to a physical set of data, creating a shared nothing architecture within a 3500 symmetric multiprocessor with up to 16 Pentiums. AT&T has put Teradata version 2.0 up on the symmetric multiprocessing box for its beta site at Boeing Co; it said it will continue to maintain compa tibility between the symmetric version and Version 5.0, the current Teradata version, for at least two years. The symmetric multiprocessing version will be migrated from a single symmetric engine up to the promised massively parallel system with multiple symmetric multiprocessors (which the company is still calling the Series 3700 internally), examples of which AT&T already has up and running.
