Unisys Corp is seeking partners for an object-relational database management system it calls Osmos which has been quietly developed by its 2200 and A series mainframe teams and now runs on Solaris, Dynix-ptx, Windows NT and its own Unix System V.4 boxes. Its talks with potential licensees are not far advanced enough for it to be able to name names. Six years in the making, Osmos is said to combine non-persistent relational storage with object-based application logic. The company expects Osmos to play in the embedded market near-term and to be used for transaction processing and decision support further out. It explains that transaction processing, where many short transactions access a small number of objects, and decision support, where applications access objects in read-only mode, combining large data sets in calculations that eventually deliver small amounts of data to the user, are well-suited to the Osmos architecture. It supports SQL3, Open Database Connectivity, Call Level Interface and proxy-object A pplication Programming Interfaces for relational or object access, with full back-up, recovery, logging and X/Open Co Ltd DTP two-phase commit. Unisys has one customer for the C/C++ system running a 13Gb database off a U6000 Unix box, storing 200m objects, containing names, addresses, telephone numbers and relationships of all geographic objects in US census files. The information is apparently used to verify addresses, compute distances and identify paths between locations.
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