Friday, November 9, 2012

The World's first RDBMS!



Nowadays, most people have heard term of database and some of them have known function of database. In my case, I had learned basic things of database. However, I do not have enough knowledge of it. According to Chapter 2 of Engineering Long-Lasting Software, "Database have historically provided high durability for stored information." I am very interested in history of relational database because I know how to code for relational database, but I do not have a history of it.

Recently, Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft are famous for Relational Database. those three companies mostly keep 90% of the market share of database. However, question came up.
Which company did develop it and start servicing it?




Edger F. Codd who worked at IBM wrote a essay titled "Derivability, Redundancy, and Consistency of Relational Store in Large Data Banks" in 1969. Database is based on contents of that essay. It talks about definition of relational algebra and calculus, and using predicate logic for controlling database. this is the origin of Relational Database.






in 1973, IBM launched project "System R." at the same time, Michael Stonebraker who was in University of California, Berkeley launched original project INGRES(Interactive Graphics Retrieval System), inspired by essay of project System R.

INGRES by Stonebraker had developed gradually and it had supported to create  other RDBMS such as Sybase, SQL server, Informix, and so on.



Larry Ellison who was in Ampex cooperated with his bosses to establish a company Software Development Laboratories in 1977. it had changed name of company to "Relational Software Inc." in 1979 and it had changed its name again to "Oracle Corp." in 1983. They made the world's first relational database management system(RDBMS) on UNIX in 1979. IBM made RDBMS which ran only on VSE in 1981 and another type of RDBNS which ran on only MVS in 1983. As diffusion of UNIX in 1980s, Oracle's RDBMS became popular because its RDBMS is based on C which is highly portable language. on the other hand, IBM's RDBMS could run on only IBM's OP.

1 comment:

  1. Hi Yoshi, Great use of images in your blog! I might have made the company logos a bit smaller but that's a minor point. Well done including the image of the book and quoting the authors. I notice Edgar Codd (notice you spelled his name incorrectly) is mentioned in the chapter 2 as well, but others such as Michael Stonbraer and Larry Ellison are not. Presumably you did some research to get that information. It's important that you cite your sources for additional information, e.g providing links to places on the webs that that information came from, or referencing physical books that you used.

    You are well on your way to an excellent blog post. The only other thing I would really like to see is to connect things more strongly to actual technical experiences. You mentioned having experiences with databases. Can you tell us more about what they were? Have you had some fun with SQL queries? Have you built a PHP page using a database? It would be great if you could tie the background thoughts into a personal technical challenge you faced with an RDBMS

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