Introduction
Database effort in PARC CSL
research
support our filing needs
basis for retrieval experiments
store images, programs, text, audio, mail, ...
document processing
Project Name
Ygg|dra|sil n. Also Yg|dra|sil. Norse Mythology. The great ash tree that holds together earth, heaven, and hell by its roots and branches. [Old Norse, probably the horse of Yggr'' : Yggr, name of Odin, from yggr, variant of uggr, frightful (see ugly) + drasill, horse.]
Needs
``Store the bits and get out of my way''
Three principle sources of needs
Distributed Notecards in ISL
Large capacity and high performance file server
Software storage for programming environments
Technology Change
Optical disks
Optical disk jukeboxes
High capacity magnetic disks
Decreasing cost of main memory
Fast commercial microprocessors/workstations
High capacity optical/magnetic tapes
Scanners
FDDI communications
Fax
Electronic printers
CD ROM
Information services
Ò deal with change and scale
System Summary
Server architecture
Large number of documents of vastly varying sizes
Document ``types'' (extensible) - few interpreted at server
Hypertext: documents can be connected via links
Documents can be named
Documents can have attributes and keywords
Documents are grouped into contexts called containers
Keyword and other indices maintained per container
Versions and alternatives
Data compression and decompression
On-line archival storage
Alerters (send a message when an event occurs)
Page level access, access control, transactions, robust, performance, recovery, and availability
Hooks for multi-server and foreign server support