Parallel Database Systems [electronic resource] : PRISMA Workshop Noordwijk, The Netherlands, September 24–26, 1990 Proceedings / edited by Pierre America.

Languages for parallel programming -- Relational algebra operations -- An overview of parallel strategies for transitive closure on algebraic machines -- Data management with massive memory: A summary -- An approach to implement dynamically defined complex objects -- Experience with MIMD message-passing systems: Towards general purpose parallel computing -- Parallel associative processing for knowledge bases -- Performance estimates of a join -- The EDS parallel relational database system -- PRISMA, a platform for experiments with parallelism -- The PRISMA experiment -- Back-end aspects of a portable POOL-X implementation -- Logging and recovery in PRISMA -- Parallel handling of integrity constraints -- Performance analysis of a dynamic query processing scheme -- Evaluation of a communication architecture by means of simulation -- A parallel implementation of the EQUIP expert system -- POOL-X and its implementation -- Automatic recovery of a parallel stable file system -- Duplicates and translation of nested SQL queries into XRA -- The POOMA architecture -- The POOMA operating system -- Parallel query execution in PRISMA/DB.

This volume presents the proceedings of a workshop on parallel database systems organized by the PRISMA (Parallel Inference and Storage Machine) project. The invited contributions by internationally recognized experts give a thorough survey of several aspects of parallel database systems. The second part of the volume gives an in-depth overview of the PRISMA system. This system is based on a parallel machine, where the individual processors each have their own local memory and communicate with each other over a packet-switched network. On this machine a parallel object-oriented programming language, POOL-X, has been implemented, which provides dedicated support for database systems as well as general facilities for parallel programming. The POOL-X system then serves as a platform for a complete relational main-memory database management system, which uses the parallelism of the machine to speed up significantly the execution of database queries. The presentation of the PRISMA system, together with the invited papers, gives a broad overview of the state of the art in parallel database systems.