Monet: An Impressionist Sketch of an Advanced Database System

Monet is a customizable database system developed at CWI and University of Amsterdam, intended to be used as the database backend for widely varying application domains. It is designed to get maximum database performance out of today's workstations and multiprocessor systems. It has already achieved considerable success in supporting a Data Mining application [12, 13], and work is well under way in a project where it is used in a high-end GIS application. Monet is a type- and algebra-extensible database system and employs shared memory parallelism. In this paper, we give the goals and motivation of Monet, and outline its architectural features, including its use of the Decomposed Storage Model (DSM), emphasis on bulk operations, use of main virtual-memory and server customization. As a case example, we discuss some issues on how to build a GIS on top of Monet; amongst others how Monet can handle the very large data volumes involved.