17 Feb
2021
17 Feb
'21
8:52 p.m.
daytona was always a separate commercial product.
it was an extremely large, very efficient database.
you should think of it as analogous to a large postgres system.
rick greer was the primary author; an overview paper is
http://www09.sigmod.org/sigmod/sigmod99/eproceedings/papers/greer.pdf
for many years, probably now as well, it was the main way that
at&t stored per-call information. as of the mid 2000s, it had over 2 trillion
calls in it.
On Feb 17, 2021, at 2:14 AM, John Gilmore
<gnu(a)toad.com> wrote:
Grant Taylor via TUHS <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org> wrote:
I don't know where the line is to transition
from stock text files and
an actual DB. I naively suspect that by the time you need an index, you
should have transitioned to a DB.
Didn't AT&T Research at some point write a database, called Daytona,
that worked like ordinary Unix commands? E.g. it just sat there in disk
files when you weren't using it. There was no "database server". When
you wanted to do some operation on it, you ran a command, which read the
database and did what you wanted and wrote out results and stopped and
returned to the shell prompt. How novel!
Supposedly it had high performance on large collections of data,
with millions or billions of records. Things like telephone billing
data.
I found a couple of conference papers about it, but never saw specs for
it, not even man pages. How did Daytona fit into Unix history? Was
it ever part of a Unix release?
John