Porting Digital's Database Management Products to the Alpha AXP Platform

1 Abstract The cornerstone software component of high-end production systems is a database management system. Digital has successfully ported the DEC Rdb for OpenVMS relational database management system and the DEC DBMS for OpenVMS network database management system to the Alpha AXP platform. Rdb and DBMS were perhaps the most complex layered products to be ported. The tight coupling of these two products to the OpenVMS VAX system made the port a challenging task. To avoid the future problem of integrating two source code bases, the porting team decided to use a common code base and to overlap current VAX development with the Alpha AXP port. The goal was to provide an easy migration path for software products to the Alpha AXP platform. Digital is one of a small number of vendors competing in the high-end, complex production systems market. Applications for this market support industries such as banking, stock exchanges, telecommunications, and information services. The Alpha AXP platform is ideally suited to meet the response time, throughput, and availability requirements of these applications, since it offers increased performance while maintaining the superb availability characteristics of VMScluster systems. Although high-end production systems involve a collection of software packages, the cornerstone software component is a database management system. Digital offers two database management systems for high-end commercial systems: DEC Rdb for OpenVMS, a relational database management system, and DEC DBMS for OpenVMS, a network (CODASYL) database management system. Digital had to port the DEC Rdb for OpenVMS VAX and DEC DBMS for OpenVMS VAX database systems to the Alpha AXP platform as early as possible to continue to compete in this commercial arena. The resulting products are the DEC Rdb for OpenVMS AXP and DEC DBMS for OpenVMS AXP systems. (Since these two products for the Alpha AXP system are the same as those for the VAX system, hereafter, we will refer to the products as Rdb and DBMS.) Additionally, both software products drive many sales of Digital's OpenVMS operating system and transaction processing and information management products such as CDD, ACMS, and DEC RALLY, which integrate with the Rdb and DBMS systems. Database management systems are among the most complex of all software products. Applications expect these systems to have 7 by 24 availability, sophisticated concurrency capabilities, fast data access, high-speed backup and restore mechanisms, and large buffer pools. To provide such functionality, the Rdb and DBMS products make extensive …