Book Description

The design of data organization and data accessing procedures for data processing systems operating on large keyed files of data is a common and recurrent activity in modern data processing applications. A considerable amount of understanding and expertise in this area has been developed and it is time to begin codifying and automating this process. It should be possible to develop a system where the user has merely to specify the characteristics of his data objects and their interrelations and the system will automatically determine the data organizations and accessing procedures that are optimal for his application. The optimizer for Protosystem I (an automatic programming system prototype at MIT) provides an example of how such automation can be accomplished.