While Oracle Corp has been up and shouting about its ability to run on parallel processors – VAXclusters, Meiko’s Computing Surface and the like, a quiet coup has been staged by a small, low profile company called Empress Software Inc, which can now support the 64-bit environment of Cray supercomputers via its relational database management system. We all appreciate that running in a 64-bit environment is clever, but is it commercially valid? Only to the niche user-base of Cray supercomputers at the moment, but over the next few years it may well be of far greater significance, since when multimedia takes off in a big way the storage capacity offered by 64-bit architecture is virtually unlimited – that is it is not restricted to 2Gb Basic Large Objects, BLOBs in the way that 32-bit architected software is. So where has this long-distance runner come from?
Commercial mistake
Empress is a Canadian company and the product that is now known as Empress is the brainchild of John Kornatowski and Ivor Ladd, both of whom were working in computer sciences at Toronto University, when in 1975 they were approached by the Department of Classical Studies at the University and asked to produce software to enable the classists to cross-reference knowledge about people in the classical world. The database that was developed was called MRS and is still in existence. By 1979, thanks to the work of Codd & Date, the relational database model was becoming popularised and Toronto University came up with funding to enable John and Ivor to sell the database commercially under the name Mistress. However, it was at this point that the two made their first big commercial mistake, while another small database enterprise known as Oracle began at around the same time by targeting commercial systems, the Toronto team, with its strong academic roots went for the Unix marketplace. In 1979 this was a bad mistake and the rest, as they say, is history. But Mistress did sell to the high-tech market and to customers such as AT&T and NASA. It is, says Chris Gordon, managing director of Empress Software UK, one of the few top six or seven databases that really uses the Unix operating system properly and, consequently is typically eight times as fast as Oracle in the Unix environment. In 1986 another big marketing mistake was made when version 1.4 of the database was released, including a fourth generation language, and was renamed Empress, despite the fact that within the Unix community the Mistress product was well-established. Despite these marketing misdemeanours the Empress system has several properties that mean its time could be just around the corner. Unix is gaining ground and credibility as an industrial strength operating system and the era of multimedia is fast approaching. From day one the database was built to handle free formal binary data via the datatype Bulk, in other words it had BLOBs from its inception and what is more BLOBs that could be manipulated. For it offers the capability for user-defined functions to be built into the kernel of the product. The algorithm has only to be named and compiled into Empress using C.
By Katy Ring
One example of this is in, say, a battlefield tactics system, where maps of the battle area are stored in bulk. User defined functions can be created, so that an algorithm called Hill will search the data for contour lines representing hills. Then a height function could be introduced to select hills of a certain height and so on. Suffice to say that, apart from defence, Empress is selling well into the Geographical Information Systems market. This Bulk data capability lends itself to the Cray market, where Empress running in 64-bit mode under Unicos on the Cray can shift huge lumps of data between the number-crunching Cray and the front-end workstation. The performance that Empress adds to a Cray is significant in that it allows vast amounts of data to be manipulated in a user-friendly way. Gordon admits that the Cray supercomputer offers a very small niche market, but Empress intends to dominate it and lice
nces on a Cray are wonderful. But the commercial ramifications of a successful 64-bit implementation could be more significant in five years time when it seems likely that 64-bit workstations will be a reality. As Gordon points out 2Gb BLOBs already seem inconsequential in a world where storage media can handle terabytes of data. It is not that Empress believes that it will fell the Oracles of this world via 64-bit software, it is simply that it has spotted an opportunity to make a market its own – Gordon believes that it is not commercially viable for companies like Oracle and Informix to chase this market because of the way their database engines are built. But how was it that this commercially unknown database, which has sold 10,000 licences worldwide, found such a keen advocate in Godalming-based Care Business Solutions?
Leap in the dark
Care was looking for a development environment for a turnkey system based on Unix. It looked at all the well-known relational databases but found that Empress was generally speaking much faster than any of them. However, this was an unknown database and Care is a small systems house and the technical team was worried about taking a leap in the dark. What clinched it for them was the way that Empress is built using a layered architecture so that the developer can dip into C at any point and never gets stuck with a fourth generation language. Furthermore, Empress is significantly less expensive then competitive products, typically half the price of Oracle, says Gordon, and up to 30% less expensive than Informix. Care was successful selling licences for Empress and so was asked to become the exclusive UK distributor. A separate division was set up called Empress Software UK and to date around 400 licences have been sold in the UK, with around half of those going to CAD/CAM users. One market where Empress is having a great deal of success is the Japanese workstation market, where in the past 18 months it has sold 2,800 licences thanks to its distributor, the Japanese software company MKC Company Ltd. MKC and Empress have exchanged equity and MKC is funding some development projects with Empress. The two companies claim that Empress is now the market leading database for Unix workstations. This particular marketplace is booming in Japan where ASCII terminals have disappeared in the commercial and financial sectors and have been replaced by RISC workstations. Empress has been marketed agressively in these sectors and the quality of the database is appreciated by the Japanese. Temperamentally, Empress is unlikely to push far into the domain of the commodity commercial database, but it looks set to flourish in its chosen sectors.
