Re: [TUHS] cut, paste, join, etc.

[Andrew Hume <andrew@humeweb.com>]

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@toad.com> wrote:
> 
> Grant Taylor via TUHS <tuhs@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
>