Implementation of relational database operations in optics

Optics have some very interesting attributes that can have a major impact on the performance of future database management systems. Among these attributes are high speed, massive parallelism, and non-interference of light beams. The impact of optics can be felt at all levels; storage, interconnection and processing. The authors introduce a hybrid opto-electronic system based on a highly parallel optical database processing unit. They discuss the architecture and indicate how various relational database operations can be performed optically. They present algorithms for each of the operations along with corresponding timing equations. The relational operations include union, set difference, intersection, projection, selection, and equi-join. Initial results of a performance analysis indicate that 10¹¹ tuple comparisons per second are possible