Yet Another New Database: Infobionics Celluar DBMS
A reader recently tipped me off to the existence of Infobionics, a company that claims to have developed a "cellular DBMS" (or CDBMS). As a huge fan of Jeff Hawkins' book On Intelligence
(as well as Numenta, the company it spawned) I've been contemplating brain-based database ideas for a while, so the possibility of somebody actually developing such a thing was pretty exciting to learn about.Unfortunately, however, the web site is heavy on promises and light on information. The claims made therein are a bit too lofty to be realistic, I think. No database, heck no software product in general, could be great as they make this system out to be. And their "how it works" diagram is, well... entirely uninformative. They do claim to have people testing it though, so it must at least do something.
One other thing I found interesting was the brief biography of the system's inventor - Boris Gelfand - listed on the management team page. You only list someone as simply "the inventor" for publicity purposes, but I can find nothing about anyone named Boris Gelfand save a chess Grandmaster by that name. Anybody know something I don't?
It'll be interesting to see if this company and its concepts turn out to be legit. Time will tell, I think... these things have a funny way of making themselves clear.
Infobionics' Cellular Database Management System ( CDBMS ) is based on a new data model (very different from relational) where a basic unit of information is a 'self-contained cell'. It is the novel data model which drives a more flexible and intuitive query language, efficient storage (not restricted to row-based or column based), and provides fast access mechanisms.
The website is being undergoing some major revision. A new site should be up in a few weeks which should be more informative answering some of your questions.
> Anybody know something I don't?
Yes. The Grand Master Boris Gelfand is actually the cousin (or some such close relation) of the inventor Boris Gelfand in real life ! No surprise or strange coincidence that they share the same name