OS-DBMS integration
A Slashdot thread tonight on the possibility of Oracle directly supporting Linux got me thinking – integration of DBMS and OS is much more common than one might at first realize, especially least in high-end data warehousing.
Think about it.
- Mainframe DB2 has OS/DBMS integration.
- Teradata has OS/DBMS integration.
- Oracle, unlike other open system DBMS vendors, has always had a lot of careful integration with (or at least interfacing to) each individual DBMS it supports.
- Microsoft of course integrates DBMS and OS
- The data warehousing appliance vendors integrate DBMS and OS. Stuart Frost of DATallegro made some excellent, detailed comments in this thread laying out that case.
This trend isn’t quite universal, of course. Open systems DB2 and Sybase and Progress and MySQL and so on are quite OS-independent, and of course you could dispute my characterization of Oracle as being “integrated” with the underlying OS. But in performance-critical environments, DBMS are often intensely OS-aware.
And of course this dovetails with a point I noted in another thread – DBMS are (or need to become) increasingly aware of chip architecture details as well.
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Hmmm … well … if you think about it, most DBMS systems share characteristics with an OS - they have dispatching systems, prioritization, disk space management. They are another operating system operating just under the ‘native’ OS.