[TUHS] cut, paste, join, etc.

[John Gilmore]

Grant Taylor via TUHS <tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org> wrote:
> I don't know where the line is to transition from stock text files and
> an actual DB.  I naively suspect that by the time you need an index, you
> should have transitioned to a DB.

Didn't AT&T Research at some point write a database, called Daytona,
that worked like ordinary Unix commands?  E.g. it just sat there in disk
files when you weren't using it.  There was no "database server".  When
you wanted to do some operation on it, you ran a command, which read the
database and did what you wanted and wrote out results and stopped and
returned to the shell prompt.  How novel!

Supposedly it had high performance on large collections of data,
with millions or billions of records.  Things like telephone billing
data.

I found a couple of conference papers about it, but never saw specs for
it, not even man pages.  How did Daytona fit into Unix history?  Was
it ever part of a Unix release?

	John