MUMPS ("Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System"), or M, is a high performance transaction processing key–value database with integrated programming language. It was originally developed at Massachusetts General Hospital for managing hospital laboratory information systems.
MUMPS technology has since expanded as the predominant database for health information systems and electronic health records in the United States. MUMPS-based information systems run over 40% of the hospitals in the U.S., run across all of the U.S. federal hospitals and clinics, and provide health information services for over 54% of patients across the U.S.
A unique feature of the MUMPS technology is its integrated database language, allowing direct, high-speed read-write access to permanent disk storage.This provides tight integration of unlimited applications within a single database, and provides extremely high performance and reliability as an online transaction processing system.
MUMPS is a language intended for and designed to build database applications. Secondary language features were included to help programmers make applications using minimal computing resources. The original implementations were interpreted, though modern implementations may be fully or partially compiled. Individual "programs" run in memory "partitions". Early MUMPS memory partitions were limited to 2048 bytes so aggressive abbreviation greatly aided multi-programming on severely resource limited hardware, because more than one MUMPS job could fit into the very small memories extant in hardware at the time. The ability to provide multi-user systems was another language design feature. The word "Multi-Programming" in the acronym points to this. Even the earliest machines running MUMPS supported multiple jobs running at the same time. With the change from mini-computers to micro-computers a few years later, even a "single user PC" with a single 8-bit CPU and 16K or 64K of memory could support multiple users, who could connect to it from (non-graphical) video display terminals.
