Sequent Computer Systems is also working with Relational Technology Inc in a bid to boost performance of the Ingres database on Sequent hardware. The two companies have a joint development agreement which aims to achieve a ten-fold improvement in relational database query performance, by providing a Parallel Database Query facility to enable the processing of database queries to be spread over multiple processors. During the two-year project, regular releases of the enhanced Ingres product for Symmetry will be delivered. Initial work will concentrate on the application of multiple processors to select data from database files, moving on to focus on applying multi-processing to perform joint operations that currently have to be run on a single processor. Until now, database performance activity has focused on the short reads and writes of on-line transaction processing, said Mark Wells of Relational Technology. Attention to parallel query technology will return considerable benefits. Early tests indicated a best case performance improvement of as much as 100 times over conventional query processing, said the company.
