Re: Hashing for DISTINCT or GROUP BY in SQL

paul c <anonymous_at_not-for-mail.invalid> writes:
> There was a big Texan you'll remember named Tom Simpson who was
> previously known for creating HASP at IBM and who used to travel up to
> Toronto to give advice. There was often talk of taking parts of Huron
> in other directions and one idea was to use some of it as a system
> programming tool. When Simpson asked, "well, just how would you issue
> an I/O?", he was taken aback with the answer "oh, that's just a table
> insert". (ie., persistence wasn't considered a logical requirement
> unlike in other dbms'.)

Tom was doing RASP before leaving IBM ... something between tss/360 and s/38 approach to disk support ... but with traditional os/360 above. folklore was that he was then doing a "clean-room" re-implementation. and that subsequent litigation and code review only found a very few similar code sequences.

there was somebody that did a port of unix to 370 at univ. a few of us tried to (unsuccesfully) talk the corporation into making him an offer ... but he went to amdahl instead to work on gold (for AU ... eventually announced as UTS). There was some amount of competition between Dallas effort and gold/uts (as a new operating system offering).

about the same time bell labs had contracted with ibm to do a stripped down tss/370 kernel called SSUP that they would layer unix on top of. I suggested to the Amdahl factions that they might resolve their differences with a similar approach (rather than either/or; don't ask why I would even be brought into any of this).

in the past i've posted some old email exchanges about uts/ssup-unix benchmarks.

-- 
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970