Fault-tolerant database using distributed associative memories

This paper describes an approach to fault-tolerant database retrieval using the distributed-associative-memory (DAM) paradigm. The fault tolerance is with respect to noise (errors) in the input key and/or corruption in the memory itself. Experimental results are presented to prove the feasibility of our approach. These results show how fault-tolerant retrieval is affected by various factors, such as the type of stored data, database size, and type of errors. We also show how the DAM model can be applied to implement a fault-tolerant relational database, in which selection operations may be easily performed with a noisy key/subkey, and complex queries can be answered correctly even if there are spelling inconsistencies in the internal representation.