 (Also need BL logo) | |
| Company type | Public |
|---|---|
| Industry | Database management systems |
| Founded | 1979 |
| Headquarters | Los Gatos, California, United States |
Number of employees | ≈200 |
Britton Lee Inc. was a pioneering relational database company. Renamed ShareBase, it was acquired by Teradata in June, 1990.[1]
Britton Lee was founded in 1979 by David L. Britton, Geoffrey M. Lee and a group of hardware engineers along with Robert Epstein, Michael Ubell and Paula Hawthorn from the research team that created Ingres.[2]
Epstein later left Britton Lee to help found Sybase. Britton and Lee left the company in 1987.[3]
On May 15, 1989, the company formally changed its name to ShareBase Corporation.[4]
After layoffs and financial losses in 1989, ShareBase was acquired by Teradata in June, 1990.[1]
As of Fall, 1989:[5]
The Server/300 came in three models:[6]
An announcement was made in 1984, that Britton-Lee's Intelligent Database Machine (IDM) was being sold together with Signal Technology Inc.'s Omnibase and SmartStar relational database software.[7]
This hardware/software combination of Omnibase/Smartstar/Britton Lee Data Base Machine(s),[8][9][10] was used by NASA,[11] USMC[12] and by financial services for analysis.[citation needed]
SmartStar is Signal Technology Inc (STI)'s application development environment for the VAX, and it supports[13] several databases using native connections:
Although before SQL became standard STI's focus was on IQL (Interactive Query Language), now the query language it supports is SQL.
Components include[15]
As the above combination moved along, STI and Britton-Lee saw a validation in the form of a review, which confirmed: "there exists no database management system that matches the performance of the IDM with OMNIBASE."[16][17]