At 12:44 PM 4/24/2002 +0200, guido.klapperich@... wrote:

>Is the Multi-Generational Architecture (MGA) a Interbase-specific
>design, that only Interbase uses or are there other DBMS like Oracle or
>DB2, that uses this architecture ?

As far as I know, InterBase was the first database to use MGA for
concurrency control - write/write conflict detection - and for
transaction recovery. At that time, some databases had "shadowing"
which kept old versions of records so a report could run without
stopping updates. PostgreSQL has implemented a system almost
exactly like Firebird's. Oracle uses something similar, but I've
never looked at it.

>I'm just writing my Bachelor-Thesis and need some information.
>What other architecturs exists than MGA and what are the main
>differences to MGA ?

Guido, this is a very well studied area of computer science and
you should be able to find a great deal of academic literature on
the subject (most of it is junk, but hey, that's academia). Phil
Bernstein wrote a terrible book about database system design which
you should find - he's very good on what he knows, but tends to
assume that if he doesn't know about it, it can't exist.

Look in the archives both here and on MERS - Jim and I have written
quite a bit about how InterBase/Firebird work.



Regards,

Ann
www.ibphoenix.com
We have answers. but we don't write theses