Associative hardware and software techniques for integrity control

Abstract

This paper presents the integrity control mechanism of the associative processing system, CASSM. The mechanism takes advantage of the associative techniques, such as content and context addressing, tagging and marking data, parallel processing, automatic triggering of integrity control procedures, etc., for integrity control and as a result offers three significant advantages: (1) The problem of staging data in a main memory for integrity checking can be eliminated because database storage operations are verified at the place where the data are stored. (2) The backout or merging procedures are relatively easy and inexpensive in the associative system because modified copies can be substituted for the originals or may be discarded by merely changing their associated tags. (3) The database management system software is simplified because database integrity functions are handled by the associative processing system to which a mainframe computer is a front-end computer.