Introduced last week at New York’s Unix Expo was the first move by Unify Corp away from the general purpose database marketplace towards a new push into specialist markets with performance optimised products. According to Bill Osberg, vice-president of software development at Unify, the advent of the SQL standard database will result in all products being at least functionally fairly similar making it more difficult for the individual DBMS suppliers to differentiate their products. Osberg says that Unify will now be concentrating on specific hardware or specific markets, the first being Unify 2000, aimed at users handling large amounts of data on multi-processor systems. Sybase has optimised its products for client-server operations, and has been sucessful in the financial marketplace, where traders and brokers using Sun workstations are doing lots of things at the same time. Now Unify 2000 is aimed at distribution and mail order companies, where there are millions of items held on a database catalogue, with people working on ASCII terminals taking orders. Unify is initially offering the system on Sequent hardware. The software is optimised for shared memory operation, says Osberg. The new approach has also led Unify to introduce an environment independent version of its Accell fourth generation language Accell SQL, which will run under different user interfaces, such as MS-Windows, Presentation Manager, and eventually AT&T’s Open Look. And the company has also entered into joint marketing agreements with rivals Sybase and Santa Cruz Operation to provide Accell on other database environments. The Sybase version will be available on Sun Microsystems’ hardware, while Santa Cruz Operation’s Integra database is aimed at the 80386-based personal computer marketplace.
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