Parallel processing and object-oriented programming are the waves of the future, and so Object Databases Inc, the US arm of Saint Quentin en Yvelines, France-based’s Intellitic International SA, is in a mood to celebrate following the news that it has been invited to implement its Matisse object-oriented database for Waltham, Massachusetts-based Kendall Square Research Inc’s KSR/1 family of general-purpose highly parallel systems, which run under a parallel version of OSF/1 (CI No 2,162). The Kendall Square implementation should be ready at the end of the year. The company is also having discussions with Hewlett-Packard Co and Digital Equipment Corp. Matisse is claimed to be a production system fit for mission-critical heavy load transaction processing environments. For the last eight months it has been in use at a $10,000m nuclear reprocessing facility in France with no hiccups, according to US president Jeff Sutherland. The application captures all sensor readings in real time and stores them for 30 years as required by law. The Matisse Server Engine will support up to hundreds of users in a client-server environment. The US National Institute of Standards & Technology has used it to increase performance of robotic factory operations. It is also in the running to handle a 100-user 5Gb card catalogue at the new French national library up against Sybase, Oracle and Adabas. Matisse guarantees consistency of data through two-phase locking for data update. Using object replication, it automatically generates duplicate versions of objects on multiple disks with negligible overheads. When a disk fails, objects are re-replicated on remaining disks and the system becomes fault-tolerant again with replacing the failed disk. The Matisse client software incorporates a micromodel for ease-of-use that is claimed to support any data model and includes an object-oriented template for integration with other applications.
