Mitsubishi Electric Develops High Proficiency Sensors Database

TOKYO, JP: Mitsubishi Electric Corporation announces the success of developing a high-performance sensor database that performs fast storage, searches and aggregation of massive data collected from sensors that are expected to be used widely in the IoT (Internet of Things) era.

The database enables sensor data to be used for purposes such as maintaining roads, railways and other infrastructure, monitoring factories and managing energy use in buildings and homes. It has a capacity to run 100 trillion data items such as three-dimensional measurements of laser sensors, etc.

The high-performance sensor database reduces storage space, load time, and searchand aggregation time each to a range of just one-tenth to one-thousandth of current levels. Mitsubishi was able to achieve such progress by optimizing the data compression by reducing input/output data traffic using a combination of 700 compression patterns. It then arranges the compressed data in to storage blocks hence reducing time. The database processes data in the cache memory thus enhancing it to parallel processing.

Previous databases used hardware enhancements such as parallel or distribution processing using many servers, in-memory processing using large amounts of memory or use fast storage devices using flash memory. Mitsubishi has achieved all this using a single server, one-two CPU’s and usage of only 4 GB of main memory.

The amount of sensor data in a database generally increases with long-term use. Some trial systems start with small amounts of data for verification prior to full-scale operation using larger data. Mitsubishi Electric's high-performance sensor database allows incremental expansion of servers as the amount of data grows. Storage capacity and performance are enhanced in the absence of data migration or changes in application software.