Based on user comment, a table would actually be a ‘bag’ in relational algebra. Some may assume it came from the fact that you defined relationships between the tables as one of the integral parts of a relational database, but in fact, ‘relation’ is another name for a table – in relational algebra. One of the interesting things to me is where the term “relational” comes from. Codd, who worked for IBM and published a paper on the topic in about 1970. The generally accepted father of the Relational database( ) is E. They were slightly better than flat files, but bear more resemblance to flat files than to the Relational databases of today. Even when they did manage to get multiple children to a parent, you couldn’t relate children to each other. You had to know the structure, including fixed-width fields in order to access the data, and you couldn’t do a query as we know them today – the relationships other than one parent to one child were not easy to define. But obviously when I say database for the rest of this post, I’m referring to something on a computer.Įarly databases were hierarchical, and could only be navigated based on their pre-defined structure. Ancient libraries and encyclopedias were certainly examples – even simple filing cabinets could be considered such. I say first ‘computer’ database intentionally, because examples of organized collections of data (the true definition of a database) are everywhere before the computer age. In my head I will continue to link early computer databases to the space program – if for no other reason than I dreamed of being an astronaut as a child, and this is the closest I will ever come! I went to research for this blog post and could find very little to support this outside of IBM sources. Note that this is my own sometimes unsupported view of database history and may include inaccuracies The early history of databasesĪs a DB2 DBA and a former IBMer, I’m biased towards IBM’s history of datbases – in which IBM seems to claim that IBM developed the first computer database either for American Airlines in 1962 (SABRE) or for the moon mission (see ) in 1964. I’m sure this post has nothing on the Wikipedia article, but I’m going to give it a go anyway.
But the truth is that I find database history fascinating. So I debated about even writing this post.
0 kommentar(er)
