Sand Technology Systems International Inc, the Montreal, Canada- based mainframe marketeer which has been pinning its hopes on Nucleus, a revolutionary combination of relational database management system and query engine, has acquired the Advanced Technology Group of Columbia Maryland-based XDB Systems Inc, on undisclosed terms, along with the source code for its Quantum Leap database engine product, yet to be released. Quantum Leap, based on the emerging SQL3 database standard, is a small footprint database engine designed for easy customization and the incorporation of new technology, says the company. It uses new processing techniques to increase applications performance, and allows ad hoc queries on enormous amounts of data to be performed cost effectively with unprecedented speed. Sand says it expects to reap significant competitive advantage within six to 12 months. Sand originally sold tapes and disk drives to the mainframe market, but more recently developed the Nucleus database, which uses column-oriented storage techniques to speed up searching on unstructured data. It had some trouble getting the technology to market (CI No 3,129), but finally launched the system in May, in conjunction with Hitachi Data Systems Ltd, as the software basis for Hitachi’s Nucleus Series of intelligent data storage products. Its first sale of a substantial system was completed at the beginning of October to a major North American railroad. XDB, founded in 1986, made its name though producing tools compatible with IBM Corp’s DB2 database which linked up to personal computers and client-server systems.
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