Date's Twelve Rules for Distributed Database Systems - Hardware Independence

Date's Twelve Rules for Distributed Database Systems - Hardware independence / DDBS should support different hardware architectures

It should be possible to run the DDBMS on a variety of hardware platforms.

The DDB and its associated DDBMS should be capable of being implemented on any suitable platform, i.e., on any computer with appropriate hardware resources regardless of what company manufactured the computer.

Any truly distributed DBMS system should not rely on a particular hardware feature, nor should it be limited to a certain hardware architecture or vendor.

Refer the following figure. In this figure, Chennai site is configured with x86 server platforms, Mumbai site is configured with Intel IA64 server platforms, and New Delhi site is configured with SPARC_64 server architecture. Irrespective of hardware and platforms, the distributed database system has to work with all architectures.

Figure - Hardware independence

Real world involves a multiplicity of different machines—IBM machines, HP machines, PCs and workstations of various kinds. This is one of the major reasons for hardware independence rule in Distributed databases.