OMNIBUS: a large data base management system

Abstract

In designing a third-generation data base and a system for interrogating and maintaining it, Industrial Indemnity Company set the following general objectives: 1. The management and retrieval system should be oriented to providing its services in a simple and straightforward way to application programs written in a high-level language, such as PL/1 or COBOL. 2. The data base should be compact. Its second-generation predecessor was a pair of files occupying together some 35 reels of magnetic tape; but the new data base, which would need to meet significantly expanded data requirements, was to fit onto a single IBM 2321 data cell drive (capacity about 390 million bytes). 3. It should be possible to design, program, and implement the system with a configuration of machines and personnel commensurate with the anticipated benefits. 4. Provision should be made for storage, retrieval, and maintenance of data elements with widely varying space requirements. Well over half of our policies have no claims at all, but a few policies for very large companies acquire claims in the thousands. 5. Both sequential and direct accessing, in a variety of combinations, should be feasible, in order to accommodate file-scanning applications, efficient updating, and an open-ended variety of inquiry and reporting applications. 6. Retrieval should be swift enough to maintain rapid response to inquiries coming from several dozen remote inquiry terminals. 7. A very high level of data integrity must be maintained, with protection inplemented in at least three ways: detection of improper attempts to alter the contents of the data base; prevention of incorrect updating; and recovery from data, program, or machine failures in a minimum of elapsed time and with a high level of justified confidence in the restored version of the data base. 8. Both the data base structures and its management system should be flexible enough to permit new and unforeseen data requirements to be accommodated in the future with a minimum of disturbance to either operational application programs or the data base management system itself.