mark@hubcap.clemson.edu (Mark Smotherman) (05/03/91)
Check out H. Lam, C. Lee, and S.Y.W. Su, "A special function unit
for database operations (SFU-DB): Design and performance evaluation,"
IEEE Trans. on Computers 40, 2 (March 1991) 263-275. The work was
done at Univ. of Florida, Gainesville, under NSF support. The unit
is designed around a distribution-sort algorithm, implemented using
an "automatic retrieval memory". They claim that the unit can do
db operations like relational join, elimination of duplicates, set
union, set intersection, and set difference in linear time. (It's
old work, of course, since the manuscript was submitted in Nov. 1988.)
--
Mark Smotherman, CS Dept., Clemson University, Clemson, SC 29634-1906
mark@cs.clemson.edu or mark@hubcap.clemson.edu