This paper describes the design of the Gamma database machine and the techniques employed in its imple- mentation. Gamma is a relational database machine currently operating on an Intel iPSC/2 hypercube with 32 pro- cessors and 32 disk drives. Gamma employs three key technical ideas which enable the architecture to be scaled to 100s of processors. First, all relations are horizontally partitioned across multiple disk drives enabling relations to be scanned in parallel. Second, novel parallel algorithms based on hashing are used to implement the complex rela- tional operators such as join and aggregate functions. Third, dataflow scheduling techniques are used to coordinate multioperator queries. By.
