PHOEBUS - AN OPTOELECTRONIC DATABASE MACHINE BASED ON PARALLEL OPTICAL DISKS

Optics have some interesting attributes that can have a major impact on the performance of future database management systems. Among these attributes are high speed, massive parallelism, and noninterference of light beams. The impact of optics can be felt at all levels: storage, interconnection, and processing. This paper presents a hybrid optoelectronic relational database machine, called PHOEBUS, that combines optical bulk storage and processing along with electronic control, fast memory, and postprocessing capabilities. The relational database is stored on parallel optical disks in a way that allows the concurrent retrieval of an entire tuple. The data are appropriately arranged on the disk surface and the rotation of the disk is used as the scanning mechanism. High transfer rates from these disks along with parallel execution of relational operations ensure short response times for a large variety of database transactions. © 1993 Academic Press, Inc.