Project Information

[ Overview | History ]

Overview

PREDATOR is an object-relational database system. The goal has been to build a research and educational vehicle that can handle real-life database problems. At Cornell, our research focus has been on techniques for the efficient support of complex data types (hence the name PRedator Enhanced DAta Type Object-Relational DBMS). However, in an effort to build a database system capable of handling realistic applications, several other "standard" features of commercial OR-DBMS systems have been implemented (or at least incorporated into the design).

The source code of PREDATOR is freely available to the database research community, as are design documentation and implementation notes. The system has been built on top of the SHORE storage manager library from the University of Wisconsin (also publicly available software). We hope that others in the community will modify, improve upon and add to this system, so that we develop a common freeware DBMS for research and education. To facilitate such use, we have provided extensive documentation of the system. There is also an online interactive tutorial that is more useful than most user manuals.

Currently, two versions of the system are available to the research community. The older Version 0.1 is a beta-release from August 1997 and runs only on Sparc/Solaris. We expect to release Version in August 1998. In order to facilitate research over the summer, we are making a pre-release Version 0.95 available in June 1998. V0.95 contains source code that runs on WindowsNT and Sparc/Solaris. There will be no significant changes to the code (beyond bug fixes) before V1.0 is released.

While the development of the system is by no means complete, rich functionality is already available. In its current form, PREDATOR can serve as a test-bed for research, as an educational tool, and as a platform for application development. Features of the V0.95 include:

We expect to release Version1.0 of PREDATOR in August 1998. The release will augment V0.95 with:

History

The origins of this system are in Praveen Seshadri's thesis work at the University of Wisconsin with Raghu Ramakrisnan and Miron Livny. The system acquired the name "PREDATOR" somewhere along the way after the usual acronym hunt. In Fall 1996, Praveen moved to Cornell, and since then, several students have participated in the project. Meet the current group here. In May 1997, the system was demonstrated at the SIGMOD 97 conference. In August 1997, Version 0.1 was released. A conference management system built on PREDATOR was used to run the SIGMOD'98 (Winter 1997) and the VLDB'98 (spring 1998) reviews process. Version 0.95 is released in June 1998.


MAIL:: User support: predator-support@cs.cornell.edu Project information : praveen@cs.cornell.edu