Performance

1. •Extreme, proven performance, reliabilty and scaleability
   

Integrate and Leverage System Administration

1. •Completely integrated with the operating system and invisible to end-users
   

Low Total Cost of Ownership

1. •Lowers implementation, licensing, hardware and ongoing costs
   

The Unix shell as a 4GL (Fourth Generation Language)

1. •Unix provides hundreds of programs that can be piped together to easily perform almost any function imaginable. Nothing comes close to providing the functions that come standard with Unix. Programs and philosophies carried over from other systems put walls between the user and Unix, and the power of Unix is thrown away. The shell, extended with a few relational operators, is the fourth-generation database scripting language most appropriate to the Unix environment. /rdb© is a high-performance relational database management and application development system designed for Unix and implemented as a suite of 131 shell-level commands built with a callable API library.
   
   

2. •Unlike other fourth generation systems, /rdb© is an extension of the Unix environment, making available the full power of Unix during application development and usage. Database utilities such as sorttable, jointable, row, column and compute are programs invoked by the shell reading tables from the standard input and writing tables to the standard output. All of the relational operators are included, as well as several indexing methods, a vi-like forms editor, a powerful report generator, menus, and a number of data transformation utilities, including all the math library functions. /rdb© stores tables in efficient variable length ASCII files, making them accessible to ordinary Unix commands.
   
   

3. •A most exciting aspect of this pipeline paradigm is its inherent parallelism: without change, /rdb© applications enjoy efficiencies that grow almost linearly with the number of processors in multi-processor systems.
   
   

4. • /rdb© means freedom from the software prisons created by proprietary interfaces that require learning yet another language or way of thinking.
   
   

5. • The UNIX Shell as a 4GL (UNIX Review,v8, n3 (March, 1991):24) includes comparisons with other database systems and /rdb© examples.
   
   

   • UNIX Relational Database Management, (by Manis, Schaffer and Jorgensen, Prentice-Hall, 1988, ISBN 0-13-938622-X) is the complete reference description for /rdb© and its approach to application development, with manual pages and a sample general ledger/accounting application.

/rdb© is available for

1. •MacOS X
   

2. •Linux
   

3. •AIX
   

4. •Solaris
   

5. •ARM, MIPS and other SOC embedded systems
   

6. •Windows systems with POSIX support
   

7. •/rdb© is EUC capable (Kanji and other multi-byte character sets)