NonStop SQL is a relational database product originally produced at Tandem Computers. NonStop is the brand name for Tandem's suite of high-availability products, a brand that survived Tandem's takeover by Compaq, and today after Compaq's takeover by HP. NonStop SQL continues to be offered as a part of this suite today.

History

Jim Gray, Franco Putzolu and Don Slutz were among the original developers. They came from the IBM System R project and moved to Tandem in the early 1980s to develop a new relational database system. NonStop SQL is designed to run effectively on parallel computers, adding functionality for distributed data, distributed execution, and distributed transactions.

First released in 1987, a second version in 1989 added the ability to run queries in parallel, and the product became fairly famous for being one of the few systems that scales almost linearly with the number of processors in the machine: adding a second CPU to an existing NonStop SQL server will almost exactly double its performance.

The second version added /MP to its name, for Massively Parallel. A third version, NonStop SQL/MX, was an attempt by Tandem Computers to create a product that was more SQL ANSI compliant than its predecessor. To enter competition with other vendors like Oracle, it was developed in the mid 1990s for the Microsoft Windows NT operating system, but the product never came out on NT and the focus was redirected to developing it on the NonStop platform. NonStop SQL/MX has shipped on the NonStop platform since 2002, and can access tables that have been created by NonStop SQL/MP, although only "Native SQL/MX tables" offer the ANSI compliance and many "Oracle-like" enhancements. The latest version of NonStop SQL is a part of the HP Neoview platform.

References

See also

• List of relational database management systems
• Comparison of relational database management systems