A full featured table manager, tableBASE is specifically designed to enable the rapid development of applications that require processing of many table lookups. It manages tables in memory and allows multiple users to concurrently read, modify and permanently store data.
tableBASE is a software tool that helps companies improve the performance of their mainframe applications by reducing the I/O usage and CPU cycle consumption inherent with database access. tableBASE optimizes your applications using indexes and access algorithms designed for in-memory use. The immediate benefit is faster running applications; a secondary, but no less valuable benefit is a reduced urgency and scale of future hardware upgrades. As mainframe upgrades become necessary due to increased demands on your data, powering your applications with tableBASE will reduce the required scale and expense of any planned upgrade.
For just about any mainframe program, tableBASE can speed processing. For example, the traditional approach to mainframe data processing, illustrated in Figure 61, involves many database accesses for every transaction.
tableBASE takes a different approach. First, an empty table is defined in memory. The appropriate data is then extracted and loaded into the empty table in memory. Without the need of further I/O, this consolidated data is reorganized, or sorted, in memory as required for transaction processing. Program logic is simplified and execution performance dramatically improved by eliminating large amounts of I/O and sorting smaller sets of data. tableBASE manages data totally in memory, without any I/O or sort-in/sort-out files. This dramatic savings in EXCPs is illustrated in Figure 62.
tableBASE is a complete infrastructure for defining, building, maintaining, controlling and using table data. Application performance and productivity can be improved by placing tables with these types of data into memory.
Sixty percent of all accesses are performed against just one percent of data. Similarly, a small portion of data is directly responsible for a large part of the maintenance effort for an application. That small percentage of data is what tableBASE has been explicitly designed to manage — more efficiently and more completely than any other product.
tableBASE is a complement to your existing technology. It is designed to deal only with memory-resident tables and to help with performance and productivity issues relating to tables. Data that properly belongs in external files should be handled by a DBMS and data which belongs in memory-resident tables should be handled by tableBASE.