Serial communication Serial communication In telecommunication and data transmission, serial communication is the process of sending data one bit at a time, sequentially, over a communication channel or computer bus. This is in contrast to parallel communication, where several bits are sent as a whole, on a link with several parallel channels. Serial communication is used for all long-haul communication and most computer networks, where the cost of cable and synchronization difficulties make parallel communication impractical. Serial computer buses are becoming more common even at shorter distances, as improved signal integrity and transmission speeds in newer serial technologies have begun to outweigh
Parallel database Parallel database A parallel database system seeks to improve performance through parallelization of various operations, such as loading data, building indexes and evaluating queries. Although data may be stored in a distributed fashion, the distribution is governed solely by performance considerations. Parallel databases improve processing and input/output speeds by using multiple CPUs and disks in parallel. Centralized and client–server database systems are not powerful enough to handle such applications. In parallel processing, many operations are performed simultaneously, as opposed to serial processing, in which the computational steps are performed sequentially. Parallel databases can be roughly divided into two groups, the