A Massive Repository for the National Medical Knowledge Bank Warren M. Sterling, Ph.D.

This paper describes a massively parallel object relational (O/R) database used in an advanced development program to create a comprehensive medical information system called the National Medical Knowledge Bank (NMKB). This database, named the Teradata Object Relational Database (TOR), was developed for massive data warehouse applications in the multiple terabyte range. We present a brief discussion of the NMKB architecture, its healthcare applications, and the requirements of TOR to support the NMKB. We then concentrate on the architecture of TOR including scalability features, large object store, system and user defined functions, geo-spatial data types, and the internal indices required to support these features.