SEQUOIA 2000 ILLUSTRA FAQ

Introductory Information

What is Illustra?
What are Montage and Miró?
What's the difference between Illustra and Postgres?
Can I get Illustra via anonymous ftp?
How do you access Illustra from a C program?
What's a 'Blade'?
Can you access an Illustra database from Mosaic?

Port and Installation Information

What platforms is Illustra available on?
What are the minimum system requirements?

What is Illustra?

Illustra is an object-relational database, the commercial version of Postgres. For detailed product information, send email to sales@illustra.com or browse their web home page.

What are Montage and Miró?

Montage and Miró were early product names and were changed after companies with similar names were found. Wherever you see Montage or Miró in white papers or articles, think Illustra.

What's the difference between Illustra and Postgres?

Many things are the same; Illustra retains the flexibility and extensibility of the Postgres database. A few new features include:

Supports SQL.
Enhanced error handling.
New C library interface (libmi).
Supports libmi in server functions.
ANSI-SQL compliant security controls with password verification.
Type inheritance in addition to class inheritance.
Backup and restore tools.
Performance improvements.

Also, see Mike Olson's white paper, A Comparison of University POSTGRES and Miró, available at s2k-ftp.CS.Berkeley.EDU:/pub/sequoia/dba/illustra/info/Postgres_Illustra.ps.Z.

Can I get Illustra via anonymous ftp?

Illustra is not available via anonymous ftp. Contact Illustra Sales representatives at:

     Illustra Information Technologies, Inc.

     1111 Broadway, Suite 2000

     Oakland, CA 94607


     Phone:  (510)652-8000

     Fax:    (510)869-6350

     Email:  sales@illustra.com

What platforms is Illustra available on?

Sequoia sites are currently working with Illustra on DEC alpha, SUN 4 OS, and SUN 4 Solaris machines. Contact Illustra sales for a complete list of ports.

What are the minimum system requirements?

Requirements vary from operating system to operating system and depend on the type of activity expected on the system.

For example, a Sun workstation or server must have at least 16 MB of memory, and 32 MB is recommended. More may be needed depending on the number of concurrent users.

A minimum of 50 MB free disk is required to install the basic system. Additional disk will be needed depending on the size and number of databases. Additional memory and disk may be needed for other applications running on the database server.

How do you access Illustra from a C program?

The Illustra distribution includes libmi, a library of C calls, for accessing a database. The Sequoia 2000 beta test group is developing sample programs to help programmers get started.

What's a 'Blade'?

A Blade, or DataBlade, is any Illustra extension. For example, the SpatialBlade adds spatial data types, operations, and access methods.

Can you access an Illustra database from Mosaic?

An Illustra backed for NCSA's SQL Gateway (gsql) is availabe.

Last modified 12-December-94

Jean Anderson (jta@postgres.berkeley.edu)