Company Profile
Teragon was conceived in October of 1995 as a World Wide Web development company specializing in dynamic web material generation engines. The idea evolved into a full-fledged object database engine that would have World Wide Web, and more recently, Java interfaces for ease of design and implementation. While currently developing a proof of concept system, Teragon is actively gauging market interest in applications developed with the technology and developer interest in the technology itself.
Object database systems are the natural extension of relational database technology to handle types of information that are inefficient to store in a traditional relational database. Today, most of the world's database systems are relational in design. These database systems are optimized for storing simple data, such as numbers, names, monetary amounts, and dates. Using relational algebra, queries on these types of data are efficient and quick to perform.
However, while these relational systems handle uniform data well, such as bank accounts where each has a particular owner and amount, they are inefficient for storing complex types of data, such as the portfolios of students in an art class. Relational systems are also inefficient for storing large blocks of data, such as images, audio, and video, which are becoming increasingly commonplace in the computer industry as the processing power of computers and the speed of networks increases to the point that such data can be easily created, manipulated, and transferred. Integrating this information with an organization's database structure will become increasingly important as these types of information become more widespread.
Many relational database manufacturers are introducing "object extensions" to their database systems. While this is consistent with their corporate plan, which protects their existing relational technology, customers, and programmers familiar with the technique, it is only capturing a fraction of the benefit that a full object database system provides. Teragon's system is fully object oriented from the ground up, eliminating the overhead that a relational system has to overcome to provide the same functionality.
Not only database system vendors, but even application developers are jumping on the Internet bandwagon, making their products "Internet-aware"- another way of saying that these applications could make their content available using the standard protocols in use by the millions of computers already connected by the Internet. Teragon's product is designed from the beginning to be a network-based system, in that it can not only provide functionality to any system on the Internet, but also distribute itself throughout the Internet to allow for greater fault tolerance and availability. Extensions can be provided that allow a World Wide Web browser, such as Netscape Corporation's Navigator, to access the multi-media information in the database.
The greatest benefit to the object database system is ease of system design. The major cost of a database system is in the ongoing maintenance of the system. This has risen sharply over the years and now accounts for more than 85% of the cost of a system. Relational systems are inherently difficult to change, which was a trade-off for the efficiency of having highly structured relationships which ran at an acceptable rate of performance on systems which existed in the past 10 years. Technology has now improved to the point that a low-end desktop system has many times the power of a $100,000 mini-computer of ten years ago. This allows some of the relationships to be abstracted at the same level of performance, while allowing changes to easily be made without changing any of the existing data. This benefit can translate into huge savings in the maintenance and upgrade of systems designed with object techniques.
Teragon is developing these internetworking distributed object database systems, a technology designed to integrate into tomorrow's information systems and is currently using this technology to design customer systems.
Teragon is targeting two of the fastest growing information technologies markets, namely Internet commercialization and database systems integrations. Teragon solutions are currently in use by CBS/Westinghouse, the McCune Foundation, Grantmakers of Western PA, the Three Rivers Wet Weather Demonstration Program, and Keller Williams Pittsburgh.
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