In a rather unfortunate prelude to launch of the KSR2 tomorrow, shares in Kendall Square Research Corp, Waltham, Massachusetts plunged $8.50 to $15.75 on Friday after the company warned that it expects turnover for the third fiscal quarter to September 25 to be substantially below analysts’ expectationsm, and that it expects to report a loss for the quarter. It said that shipments for the quarter were in line with expectations, but the amount of revenue that can be included in the third quarter results is subject to further review. The forthcoming KSR2 machine is claimed to run standard Ingres and Oracle relational databases in such a way that neither SQL queries or database applications need be re-written to take advantage of parallelism. Kendall Square’s technology includes the provision of a single virtual memory, Gigacache, at the system level. This provides a kind of emulation of symmetrical multi-processing that makes a hardware-specific distributed lock manager unnecessary. Oracle7 is already generally available on its KSR1 machines, and has an SQL Query Decomposer in op eration which at one site, Neodata Inc, reduced the processing time for a huge decision support query down from two weeks to 10 min utes, the company claims.
