RISC processors for high performance database systems

Looks at the area of database servers within a client server architecture supporting systems with many thousands of users and with database sizes within the terabyte range. Machines for this market must have high integrity and resilience as well as being extensible over a range of performance capabilities. RISC microprocessor technology, by providing high performance at low cost has now made such machines viable. RISC processors can be used to build a processing element within the distributed machine which may have many hundreds of such elements. The paper describes one such system, the EDS machine developed within the European Commissions ESPRIT II EP2025 programme. This system is designed to support a number of different relational database management systems