Oracle Corp, Belmont, California is now working with NCube Corp and Cambridge, Massachusettsbased Bolt Beranek & Newman Inc’s BBN Advanced Computers, as well as the California and the Massachusetts Institutes of Technology to develop a parallel database engine, with the aim of coming up with something that will be four times faster and 20 times more costeffective than the largest IBM mainframe database system available today. It is using the likes of the Inmos International Transputer board amongst others to develop the database, a prototype of which is expected out in the summer. Based on the standard Oracle Version 6 it is expected to operate at hundreds of MIPS and thousands of instructions per second, implemented on a multiple computer machine, possibly BBN’s Butterfly or NCube’s hypercube multimicroprocessor system.
