Minibase is a database management system intended for educational use, and is distributed subject to conditions set forth in the Terms of Distribution. It has a parser, optimizer, buffer pool manager, storage mechanisms (heap files, secondary indexes based on B+ Trees), and a disk space management system. The goal is not just to have a functional DBMS, but to have a DBMS where the individual components can be studied and implemented by students.
A GUI front-end (with support for a subset of QBE), visualization tools for the buffer manager, B+ trees, query optimizer and database design (specifically, creating ER diagrams and doing normalization) are available.
Minibase has been developed in conjunction with the text Database Management Systems by Raghu Ramakrishnan. The HTML documentation for Minibase provides an overview of the system architecture and component interfaces. The text provides the necessary background information on file and record organizations, buffer management, access methods, relational query languages and operator implementation techniques, query optimization, database design, concurrency control and recovery.
If you have any questions, bug reports or comments, please
send me mail.
July 12, 1996
Raghu Ramakrishnan [raghu@cs.wisc.edu]