" ... a revolution in the use of databases ... "

/rdb from Revolutionary Software

The Unix shell as a 4GL

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.

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 which read tables from the standard input and write 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.

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 SMP systems.

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

The UNIX Shell as a 4GL is a more detailed description, including comparisons with other database systems and /rdb examples.

For more information ...

• The /rdb man pages are available online.
• UNIX Relational Database Management, by Rod Manis (Prentice-Hall, 1988, ISBN 0-13-938622-X) is the complete reference description of /rdb and its approach to application development, with manual pages and a sample general ledger/accounting application.
• Read the discussion of /rdb's approach to the Y2K dilemma.
• Price list and policies, blurb and rant.
• demo and library directories
• See a sample application in action at The Melody Shop.
• The Dress Shop is a stunning demonstration of e-commerce joined with a relational database and Javascript.
• The WWW Toolkit prototypes ad hoc query generation.
• /rdb2kgrok converts your /rdb table to a downloadable zaurus GUI application
• Downloading, installing and licensing /rdb.

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  Y2K BUG ALERT FOR /rdb v6.3 USERS

  The /rdb date program todaysdate is not working properly. If you have version 6.3 and do not (or cannot) upgrade to version 7, there is a shell script work-around at y2kpatches/todaysdate.sh, which should be installed in $RDB/bin/todaysdate, mode 755. Since not all UNIX-system date commands behave the same way, this script may not work for you. If you are familiar with UNIX and shell scripting, you can amend todaysdate.sh to suit your system. Otherwise, email your man page for date, along with the way you customarily use todaysdate and we will try to write a script replacement for your system.

  Y2K BUG ALERT FOR /rdb v7 USERS

  The /rdb date programs julian, gregorian, todaysdate, convertdate and wday are adding an extra century to the date. We are patching as fast as we can, beginning with the operating systems in widest use.

  To install the patch on your system, download the gzipped file that corresponds to your operating system. From your /rdb home directory ($RDB), gzip and un-tar the file, for example:

  # cd /usr/local/rdb
  # gzip -dc rdbpatch.linux.gz | tar -xf -
  
  

  /rdb is also available for

• MacOS X, for
• MIPS on the Linksys/Broadcom platform, as well as for
• Windows 95/NT with the cygwin toolkit.
• /rdb is EUC capable (Kanji and other multi-byte character sets)