Britton Lee, Inc.

Britton Lee Inc. was a pioneering relational database company. Renamed ShareBase, it was acquired by Teradata in June, 1990.^[1]

Britton Lee Inc. (renamed ShareBase Corp.)

(Also need BL logo)
Company type	Public
Industry	Database management systems
Founded	1979
Headquarters	Los Gatos, California, United States
Number of employees	≈200

History

Britton Lee was founded in 1979 by David L. Britton, Geoffrey M. Lee, and a group of hardware engineers along with Robert Epstein, Michael Ubell and Paula Hawthorn from the research team that created Ingres.^[2] The company sold database machines, specialized computers designed for database software. As of 1985^[update] it had an installed base of about 300, primarily for midrange systems such as DEC VAX.^[3]

Epstein later left Britton Lee to help found Sybase. Britton and Lee left the company in 1987.^[4] On May 15, 1989, the company formally changed its name to ShareBase Corporation.^[5]

After layoffs and financial losses in 1989, ShareBase was acquired by Teradata in June, 1990.^[1] Teradata was, like Britton-Lee, an early database machine vendor.^[3]

Products

As of Fall, 1989:^[6]

• ShareBase II (tm): An RDBMS designed for a client/server environment.
• ShareBase(tm) I: Predecessor to ShareBase II
• ShareBase SQL Database Server, various models:^[7]
  • Server/8000(tm): "Upper-mid-range database server" that supported ShareBase II. Optimized database operations on a RISC/ECL database processor. Used a "distributed function multiprocessor architecture" and included up to 256 MB of "shared high-speed data memory." Supported a variety of clients, including IBM PC DOS, Apple Macintosh, Sun, AT&T 3B series computers systems, Pyramid, DEC VAX, HP 3000 and HP 9000, and IBM VM/CMS and MVS.
  • Server/300 (tm), supported ShareBase I and worked with a variety of clients, including PC/DOS, UNIX workstations, AT&T System V, Sun, and DEC VAX with BSD/UNIX, VAX/VMS, or ULTRIX. It also supported up to 50 databases, 32,000 tables per database, 2 billion rows per table, 4 MB of memory, and 200 concurrent users.^[7]
  • Server/700 (tm), supported ShareBase I,^[7] same basic features as the Server/300, but with 6 MB of memory and "greater performance for more demanding environments".^[7]
• ShareCom: Communications facilities between database clients and the ShareBase servers.

The Server/300 came in three models:^[7]

• Model 25: 600 MB of disk storage and one tape drive
• Model 35: 1200 MB of disk storage and two tape drives
• Model 60: 3320 MB of disk storage and two tape drives

Affiliation with Omnibase/SmartStar

An announcement was made in 1984, that Britton-Lee's Intelligent Database Machine (IDM) was being sold together with Signal Technology Inc.'s Omnibase and SmartStar relational database software.^[8]

This hardware/software combination of Omnibase/Smartstar/Britton Lee Data Base Machine(s),^[9][10][11] was used by NASA,^[12] USMC^[13] and by financial services for analysis.^{[citation needed]}

SmartStar is Signal Technology Inc (STI)'s application development environment for the VAX, and it supports^[14] several databases using native connections:

RMS,^[15] Rdb/VMS, Oracle, Sybase, Ingres, Teradata/ShareBase.

Although before SQL became standard STI's focus was on IQL (Interactive Query Language), now the query language it supports is SQL.

Components include^[16]

• SmartBuilder
• SmartDesign
• SmartStation
• SmartGL
• SmartCall and RSQL (for use from 3GL languages)
• SmartQuery
• SmartMove (mass load/unload)
• SmartReport
• SmartPainter
• ISQL (Interactive SQL)

Signal Technology Inc

As the above combination moved along, STI and Britton-Lee saw a validation in the form of a review, which confirmed: "there exists no database management system that matches the performance of the IDM with OMNIBASE."^[17][18]