Portfolio
Distributing: How To Take Advantage of the SQL Environment
Source: 370/390 DATA BASE MANAGEMENT Published: Apr 1991
George Schussel discusses how the emergence of SQL helped distributed computing become real. Comments from the article follow:
- Distributed DBMS technology provides the highest level of services for supporting distributed processing. Specific advantages from the use of this technology include:
- As your processing needs grow, you can upgrade the hardware environment incrementally
- and as needed without throwing away your previous investments.
- By spreading the processing over many smaller machines, you take advantage of the downsized cost advantage that smaller machines hold over larger ones.
- The fact that a distributed DBMS offers support for replicated data can contribute mightily to satisfying requirements for high availability and fault tolerance.
- This same architecture is helpful for hardware maintenance because of its modularity.
- Distributed DBMS technology offers high performance SQL-based processing because its architecture takes advantage of parallel processing on many computers across a network. As a result, you can use relational processing for online transactions that might otherwise have been impractical on a single mainframe.
Downsizing and distributing the computing environment are very real and practical approaches to getting more functionality at a lower cost. The availability of SQL has greatly accelerated the movement toward distributed and client/server DBMS environments. This has been principally because SQL has emerged as the standard data base language. The fact that SQL is a relational language and, therefore, supports set processing is also very helpful in a distributed environment. Distributed and client/server SQL DBMSs form the keystone in the migration to the distributed network-based parallel computing architectures of the 1990s.
