Company:Britton Lee, Inc.

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Britton Lee Inc. (renamed ShareBase Corp.)
TypePublic
IndustryDatabase management systems
Founded1979
HeadquartersLos Gatos, California, United States
Number of employees
≈200

Britton Lee Inc. was a pioneering relational database company. Renamed ShareBase, it was acquired by Teradata in June, 1990.[1]

History

Britton Lee was founded in 1979 by David L. Britton, Geoffrey M. Lee and a group of hardware engineers along with Robert Epstein, Michael Ubell and Paula Hawthorn from the research team that created Ingres.[2]

Epstein later left Britton Lee to help found Sybase. Britton and Lee left the company in 1987.[3]

On May 15, 1989, the company formally changed its name to ShareBase Corporation.[4]

After layoffs and financial losses in 1989, ShareBase was acquired by Teradata in June, 1990.[1]

Products

As of Fall, 1989:[5]

  • ShareBase II (tm): An RDBMS designed for a client/server environment.
  • ShareBase(tm) I: Predecessor to ShareBase II
  • ShareBase SQL Database Server, various models:[6]
    • Server/8000(tm): "Upper-mid-range database server" that supported ShareBase II. Optimized database operations on a RISC/ECL database processor. Used a "distributed function multiprocessor architecture" and included up to 256 megabytes of "shared high-speed data memory." Supported a variety of clients, including IBM PC DOS, Apple Macintosh, Sun, AT&T 3B series computers systems, Pyramid, DEC VAX, HP 3000 and HP 9000, and IBM VM/CMS and MVS.
    • Server/300 (tm), supported ShareBase I and worked with a variety of clients, including PC/DOS, UNIX workstations, AT&T System V, Sun, and DEC VAX with BSD/UNIX, VAX/VMS, or ULTRIX. It also supported up to 50 databases, 32,000 tables per database, 2 billion rows per table, 4 megabytes of memory, and 200 concurrent users.[6]
    • Server/700 (tm), supported ShareBase I,[6] same basic features as the Server/300 but with 6 megabytes of memory and "greater performance for more demanding environments".[6]
  • ShareCom: Communications facilities between database clients and the ShareBase servers.

The Server/300 came in three models:[6]

  • model 25, 600 megabytes of disk storage and one tape drive
  • model 35, 1200 megabytes of disk storage and two tape drives
  • model 60, 3320 megabytes of disk storage and two tape drives

Affiliation with Omnibase/SmartStar

An announcement was made in 1984, that Britton-Lee's Intelligent Database Machine (IDM) was being sold together with Signal Technology Inc.'s Omnibase and SmartStar relational database software.[7]

This hardware/software combination of Omnibase/Smartstar/Britton Lee Data Base Machine(s),[8][9][10] was used by NASA,[11] USMC[12] and by financial services for analysis.[citation needed]

SmartStar is Signal Technology Inc (STI)'s application development environment for the VAX, and it supports[13] several databases using native connections:

RMS,[14] Rdb/VMS, Oracle, Sybase, Ingres, Teradata/ShareBase.

Although before SQL became standard STI's focus was on IQL (Interactive Query Language), now the query language it supports is SQL.

Components include[15]

  • SmartBuilder
  • SmartDesign
  • SmartStation
  • SmartGL
  • SmartCall and RSQL (for use from 3GL languages)
  • SmartQuery
  • SmartMove (mass load/unload)
  • SmartReport
  • SmartPainter
  • ISQL (Interactive SQL)

Signal Technology Inc

As the above combination moved along, STI and Britton-Lee saw a validation in the form of a review, which confirmed: "there exists no database management system that matches the performance of the IDM with OMNIBASE."[16][17]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Todd White (November 5, 1990). "Teradata Corp. suffers first quarterly loss in four years". Los Angeles Business Journal. http://www.allbusiness.com/north-america/united-states-california-metro-areas/123633-1.html. Retrieved 2008-07-14. 
  2. ↑ Joseph M. Hellerstein, Michael Stonebraker (2005). Readings in Database Systems: Fourth Edition. MIT Press. p. 98. ISBN 0-262-69314-3. https://books.google.com/books?id=7a48qSMuVcUC&q=Britton-Lee+founded&pg=PA98. Retrieved 2008-07-14. 
  3. ↑ Robert Knight (April 1988). "Some choose a hardware DBMS". Software Magazine. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0SMG/is_n5_v8/ai_6654621. Retrieved 2008-07-14. 
  4. ↑ BRITTON LEE, INC. (March 31, 1989), Securities and Exchange Commission Form 10-Q 
  5. ↑ ShareBase (December 1988), Server/8000 Product Overview 
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 ShareBase (February 1989), ShareBase I Technical Overview 
  7. ↑ "Signal / Britton-Lee". Computerworld: p. 55. March 5, 1984. https://books.google.com/books?id=MMSvi567BMUC. "Signal Technology, Inc. has announced that its Omnibase data base ... software is now being sold with the Britton-Lee, Inc. Intelligent Database Machine as a ... Signal Technology's Smartstar, a family of programs for applications generation." 
  8. ↑ "Full text of "Computerworld" - Internet Archive". Computerworld. May 21, 1984. https://archive.org/stream/computerworld1821unse/computerworld1821unse_djvu.txt. "COMPUTERWORLD MAY 21, 1984 NEWS DDP from page 1 the Decnet local-area network permits ... Signal Technology's OMNIBASE software driving Britton-Lee's IDM database machine is breaking records ... Signal Technology Inc. ..." 
  9. ↑ "DBA/Developer Resume Profile Carlsbad, CA". https://www.hireitpeople.com/resume-database/78-oracle-dba-resumes/51947-dbadeveloper-resume-profile-carlsbad--ca. "... Structured Query Language SQL , PL SQL triggers and procedures on Unix ... SQL DBA, OMNIBASE SMARTSTAR RDBMS, Britton Lee Database Machine" 
  10. ↑ "Resume for R... B...". http://www.databaseconsulting.com. "... , OMNIBASE (SMARTSTAR) Database, Britton Lee ..." 
  11. ↑ Issues and Recommendations Associated with Distributed Computation. U.S. National Research Council, Space Science Board. 1986. https://books.google.com/books?id=h4krAAAAYAAJ. "... machine Britton-Lee Space Astronomy catalog telescope IDM 500- Omnibase Relational data base machine Britton-Lee JPL-SFOC Space flight operations." 
  12. ↑ "K... B... - Senior Application Developer". https://www.linkedin.com. "... coded and maintained Marine Corps database systems using C and SMARTSTAR, ... a DEC Micro VAX II and a BRITTON LEE Intelligent Database Machine." 
  13. ↑ "STI SmartStar 4GL". September 9, 1985. https://books.google.com/books?id=fzlfAWYHBpQC. "Signal Technology, Inc. has announced that its Smartstar fourth generation ..." 
  14. ↑ "SmartStar interfaces VAX RMS". Computerworld: p. 25. July 29, 1985. https://books.google.com/books?id=2Huij24Zmr0C. "Smartstar Version 4 includes a Relational Query Processor interface to VAX RMS" 
  15. ↑ "SmartStar". http://smartstar.com/smartstar. 
  16. ↑ "Intelligent Database Machine performance". Computerworld: p. 28. October 20, 1986. https://books.google.com/books?id=gvU799ixIbcC. "... there exists no database management system that matches the performance of the IDM with OMNIBASE. The tests compared the Britton Lee Intelligent Database Machine ..."" 
  17. ↑ Exton-Smith, Howard (1986). "Application of a fourth-generation environment". Data Processing 28 (9): 482–484. doi:10.1016/0011-684X(86)90317-5. "Smartstar, and Omnibase/. Britton-Lee, among others. After making a shortlist, they decided that Focus would make them generate too much non-procedural.". 

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