New types of data processing applications are no longer satisfied with the capabilities offered by the relational data model. One example of this phenomenon is the growing use of the Internet as a source of data. The data on the Internet is inherently non-relational. As a result, demand developed for database management systems natively built on advanced data models. The semantic binary data model (Rishe, 1992), satisfies the criteria for the models required for today's applications by providing the ability to build rich schemas with arbitrarily flexible relationships between objects. In this paper, we discuss a new design for a semantic database management system which is based on the semantic binary data model. Our challenge was to design and implement a database engine which, while being native to the model, is reasonably efficient on a wide variety of industrial applications, and which surpasses relational systems in performance and flexibility on those applications that require non-relational modelling. Special attention is given to multi-platform support by the semantic database engine.
