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

[Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com>]

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On Wed, Feb 17, 2021 at 5:16 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?
>

It seems that Andrew has addressed Daytona, but there was a small database
package called `pq` that shipped with plan9 at one point that I believe
started life on Unix. It was based on "flat" text files as the underlying
data source, and one would describe relations internally using some
mechanism (almost certainly another special file). An interesting feature
was that it was "implicitly relational": you specified the data you wanted
and it constructed and executed a query internally: no need to "JOIN"
tables on attributes and so forth. I believe it supported indices that were
created via a special command. I think it was used as the data source for
the AT&T internal "POST" system. A big downside was that you could not add
records to the database in real time.

It was taken to Cibernet Inc (they did billing reconciliation for wireless
carriers. That is, you have an AT&T phone but make a call that's picked up
by T-Mobile's tower: T-Mobile lets you make the call but AT&T has to pay
them for the service. I contracted for them for a short time when I got out
of the Marine Corps---the first time) and enhanced and renamed "Eteron" and
the record append issue was, I believe, solved. Sadly, I think that
technology was lost when Cibernet was acquired. It was kind of cool.

        - Dan C.

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