Database Systems: Design and Implementation of a Production Database Management System (DBM-2)

Design and Implementation of a Production Database Management System (DBM-2) By T. C. CHIANG and G. R. ROSE (Manuscript received September 18,1982) The DBM-2 is a transaction-oriented database management system designed to track activities within an organization. Being a production system, DBM-2 has different requirements and design criteria than exploratory database management systems. To support such applications in a production environment, DBM-2 is required to have high performance and flexibility. An extended entity-relationship (E-R) data model provides a basis for DBM-2 in meeting the requirements. The extended E-R data model simplifies the handling of existence dependency between data records by DBM-2. This paper presents the design and implementation of DBM-2. Special attention is given to the implementation of "associations" between records, because the implementation is critical for supporting the E-R model. I. INTRODUCTION The DBM-2 is transaction-oriented database management system designed to track business activities in an enterprise. The first application is the Loop Maintenance Operation System (LMOS-2),1 a transaction system for tracking repair activities of an operating company. The DBM-2 together with the LMOS-2 application software has been in field trial since October 16, 1980, and will be deployed in most of the Bell operating companies in the United States in 1982. Thus, DBM-2 is a real production system. It is programmed in C,2 and runs under the UNIX* operating system version 4.03 on a DEC P D P 11/70 c o m p u t e r W o r k is being done to transport DBM-2 to a DEC V A X 11/ 780 computer.