Storage sub-systems to support large functional databases

Earlier work by Maller and King (1996) evaluated the suitability of a functional database language (FDL) being used to support large applications in the field of investigative systems. This is a growing generic application area covering criminal and military intelligence and characterised by: significant data complexity; large data sets; and the need for high performance, interactive use. The evaluation confirmed the soundness of FDL but, heavy use in a practical context showed improvements were needed to areas like string matching and graph traversal. Also, an implementation on multiprocessor, parallel architectures would help meet the performance requirements arising from existing and projected database sizes in this application area. This paper discusses some of the proposed changes to the interfaces in the software architecture for a future system that should meet both the requirements of extended functionality and potential parallelisation.