A Short History of Databases

This is a very interesting commentary on 'Government Support for Computing Research', which is Chapter 6 of a book called 'Funding a Revolution' ,published by the National Academies Press. Here's a detailed review of the evolution of Databases, compiled by John Vaughn of Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Relational Databases have gone through three major Stages of Evolution ...

Stage (1) The Early Days. The theoretical foundation for Relational Databases was formulated by Dr.Edgar (Ted) Codd at IBM Research, Almaden, California and published a seminal Paper in 1969, entitled :- "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks". Ingres from the University of California at Berkeley was the first academic initiative which picked up Codd's published work from IBM and then developed and Oracle was the first commercial product based on this work. In 1976, Peter Chen published a very important Paper on Data Modelling entitled "The Entity-Relationshop Model - Towards a Unified View of Data" in the ACM Transaction on Database Systems. Here's a historical article written by C.F.Date who,of course, occupies a unique role and made an essential contribution to the success of Relational Databases.

Stage (2) The Middle Years IBM, Informix and Sybase entered the Arena. Finally Microsoft bought Sybase's technology to join the fray.

Stage (3) The Future The future will evolve to incorporate Objects, Hybrids and will be geared to meet the requirements of the Internet. The most likely scenario sees the survival of only three Vendors, (which was confirmed by IBM's acquisition of Informix for $1 Billion) :- Oracle, IBM and Microsoft.