Introduction to Pathmaker

Tandem Databases and TMF
Introduction to Pathmaker and Pathway
1–34 067867 Tandem Computers Incorporated
Tandem Databases
and TMF
This subsection discusses the Tandem database management products and the
Transaction Monitoring Facility (TMF) product, which helps ensure the integrity of
data. This discussion will focus on how these products interact with and affect the
Pathmaker product.
Tandem Database Products Tandem offers two database management products: the NonStop SQL product and
Enscribe.
Both of these products support the creation and use of large databases capable of
operating either as local or distributed systems.
A Pathmaker application is capable of accessing data in a Non Stop SQL or Enscribe
database. A single server can even access data from both types of database.
NonStop SQL
The NonStop SQL product is the Tandem implementation of a distributed structured
query language (SQL) Relational Database Management System. NonStop SQL is
based on the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) specification for the SQL
language.
SQL is a language used for:
Database definition and creation
Database access and data manipulation
Data in an SQL database is represented as two-dimensional structures called tables.
NonStop SQL data manipulation statements can operate on a single row or a set of
rows. NonStop SQL statements can either be entered directly from a terminal or
embedded in another language such as COBOL85. The Pathmaker product includes a
facility that generates some NonStop SQL database access statements from
information that application developers enter on certain Pathmaker screens.
Enscribe
Enscribe is part of the Encompass family of products offered by Tandem. These
products made up the first commercial distributed database system sold by Tandem.
Enscribe is a database record management facility that executes statements in a server
(such as READ or WRITE) to access a database and manipulate data. This powerful
system provides one-at-a-time access to records in different types of commonly used
files, including key-sequenced, entry-sequenced, and relative record files.