Cyberquery is a software product of Cyberscience Corporation Inc. Originally developed for data handling and analysis on

Data General Data General Corporation was one of the first minicomputer firms of the late 1960s. Three of the four founders were former employees of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Their first product, 1969's Data General Nova, was a 16-bit minicompu ...

AOS and AOS/VS minicomputers, then the available platforms for Cyberquery were extended to all major

UNIX Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

platforms,

OpenVMS OpenVMS, often referred to as just VMS, is a multi-user, multiprocessing and virtual memory-based operating system. It is designed to support time-sharing, batch processing, transaction processing and workstation applications. Customers using Ope ...

, and Microsoft Windows.

Description of Cyberquery

Invented in 1980, Cyberquery is a declarative "4GL"

fourth-generation programming language A fourth-generation programming language (4GL) is any computer programming language that belongs to a class of languages envisioned as an advancement upon third-generation programming languages (3GL). Each of the programming language generations ...

. Its early design was slightly influenced by RAMIS and other data access and analysis languages such as the query language on GE time sharing systems. Cyberquery automates the process of accessing files or tables and reading records or rows. This basic operation allows the user/developer to concentrate on the details of working with the data within each record, in effect working almost entirely within an implicit

program loop In computer science, control flow (or flow of control) is the order in which individual statements, instructions or function calls of an imperative program are executed or evaluated. The emphasis on explicit control flow distinguishes an ''im ...

that runs for each record. Compared to

general-purpose programming language In computer software, a general-purpose programming language (GPL) is a programming language for building software in a wide variety of application domains. Conversely, a domain-specific programming language is used within a specific area. For ex ...

s, this automation allows the user/developer to ignore the technical details of the data and how it is stored, and concentrate on the information contained in the data. Cyberquery has a data dictionary to describe the datasets users wish to access. This removes all the physical details of the file structure from each program and from the user/developer. The original target customers for Cyberquery were personnel departments, so ease of use by non computer specialists was an early design goal. This architecture had the advantage that Cyberquery is portable, reports written for one database run unmodified on any other provided the underlying data is logically similar. Differences are hidden in the data dictionary. Cyberquery is now widely deployed in Industries including Manufacturing, Finance, Medical and Retail.

External links

Official site
Fourth-generation programming languages Companies based in Denver Business intelligence software