home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- .\" XXX standard disclaimer belongs here....
- .\" $Header: /private/postgres/ref/RCS/introduction,v 1.14 1992/07/13 03:45:59 ptong Exp $
- .SS INTRODUCTION 5/02/90
- .XA 0 "Section 1 \*- Introduction"
- .sp 2i
- .ps 14
- .ce
- .b "SECTION 1 \*- INTRODUCTION"
- .sp 3
- .uh OVERVIEW
- .lp
- This document is the reference for the \*(PP database system
- under development at the University of California, Berkeley.
- It is intended to be a supplement to the \*(PP Manual, which is
- included in this distribution.
- The \*(PP project,
- led by Professor Michael Stonebraker
- is sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
- .r ( \c
- .A DARPA ),
- the
- Army Research Office (ARO), the National Science Foundation (NSF),
- and
- .A ESL ,
- Inc.
- .lp
- \*(PP is distributed in source code format and is
- the property of the Regents of the University of California.
- However, the University will grant unlimited commercialization
- rights for any derived work on the condition that it obtain an
- educational license to the derived work.
- For further information, consult the Berkeley Campus Software Office,
- 295 Evans Hall, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720.
- Moreover, there is no organization who can help you
- with any bugs you may encounter or with any other problems.
- In other words,
- this is
- .b unsupported
- software.
- .uh "\*(PP DISTRIBUTION"
- .sp
- This reference describes Version \*(PV of \*(PP. The \*(PP software is
- about 200,000 lines of C code, and is available for
- SUN 4 class machines, for DECstation 3100 and 5000 machines and for
- the SEQUENT Symmetry machine.
- Information on obtaining the source code for these computers is
- available from:
- .(l
- Chandra Ghosh
- Computer Science Division
- 521 Evans Hall
- University of Califiornia
- Berkeley, CA 94720
- (510) 642-4662
- .)l
- .sp
- Version \*(PV has been tuned modestly. Hence on the Wisconsin benchmark,
- one should expect performance about twice that of the public domain,
- University of
- California Version of \*(II, a relational prototype
- from the late 1970s.
- .sp
- .uh "\*(PP DOCUMENTATION"
- .lp
- This
- reference describes the functionality of Version \*(PV
- and contains
- notations where appropriate to indicate which features are not implemented in
- Version \*(PV.
- Application developers should note that
- this reference contains only the specification for
- the low-level call-oriented application program interface,
- LIBPQ.
- .lp
- The remainder of this reference is structured as follows.
- In Section 2 (UNIX),
- we discuss the \*(PP capabilities that are available directly
- from the operating system.
- Section 3 (BUILT-INS) describes \*(PP internal data types, functions, and
- operators.
- Section 4 (COMMANDS) then describes \*(PQ,
- the language by which a user interacts with a
- \*(PP database.
- Then,
- Section 5 (LIBPQ) describes
- a library of low level routines through which a user can
- formulate \*(PQ queries from a
- C program and get appropriate
- return information back to his program.
- Next,
- Section 6 (FAST PATH) continues with a description of
- a method by which applications may execute functions in \*(PP
- with very high performance.
- Section 7 (LARGE OBJECTS) describes the internal \*(PP interface for accessing
- large objects.
- The reference concludes with Section 8 (FILES), a collection of file format
- descriptions for files used by \*(PP.
- .lp
- .uh ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
- .lp
- \*(PP has been constructed by a team of undergraduate, graduate, and
- staff programmers.
- The contributors (in alphabetical order) consisted of
- James Bell,
- Jennifer Caetta,
- Jolly Chen,
- Ron Choi,
- Jeffrey Goh,
- Joey Hellerstein,
- Wei Hong,
- Anant Jhingran,
- Greg Kemnitz,
- Case Larsen
- Jeff Meredith,
- Michael Olson,
- Lay-Peng Ong,
- Spyros Potamianos,
- Sunita Sarawagi,
- and Cimarron Taylor.
- .lp
- For Version 4.0, Jeff Meredith served as chief programmer and was
- responsible for
- overall coordination of the project and for individually implementing the
- "everything else"
- portion of the system.
- .lp
- This reference was collectively written by
- the above implementation team,
- assisted by Michael Stonebraker, Chandra Ghosh and Claire Mosher.
- .uh FOOTNOTES
- .lp
- \*(UU is a trademark of
- .A AT&T .
-