The origins of database technology date back to the 1950s. In that decade and the next, it was the norm for a computer program to store and manage its own data and files. Database technology evolved as a solution to manage access to shared data. Industry terminology for the first two decades was different than today. Data banks, data management systems (DMS) and data base (two words) are terms that are no longer in common usage.
MIT's COMPOOL was probably the earliest example of a centralized data definition capability. The Mark I report generator developed in 1956 at the GE plant in Hanford, Washington was one of the most significant of early efforts. It was the ancestor of GE Mark II (1967), IBM Report Program Generator (RPG), 1961, and Computer Sciences' COGENT (1965). BASE-BALL provided access to data via natural language processing. In 1961, Collilla and Sams first described b-trees that are widely used in database and file indexes.
R.A. Collilla, B.H. Sams
IBM FFS was a Formatted File System for second-generation IBM mainframe computers. The first prototype was Information Retrieval, developed for the IBM 704 in 1958. In 1961, the US Air Force SAC FFS was probably the first example of a stored data definition, or self-describing database. IBM Generalized Information System (GIS) was first developed in 1965 as a standalone DBMS product. It later became a query processor for IBM IMS.
Davis, Todd and N.R.Vesper (David Taylor Model Basin)
The evolution of the multi-valued DBMS began with the Generalized Information Retrieval and Listing System (GIRLS) developed in 1962 for the IBM 7090, a second generation computer. At TRW (1965), Dick Pick and Don Nelson developed the DBMS that is the forerunner of today's Pick System. That system was Generalized Information Management (GIM), and later I-GIM, and GIM II. Other successors to GIRLS include Informatics Mark IV (1968) and Microdata Reality (1973).
T. Dwight Buettell, Don Nelson, Dick Pick, J.A. Postley
GE Integrated Data Store (IDS) was a 1964 data management system that was a major influence on the development of the network model DBMS. The Conference on Data Systems Languages (CODASYL) chartered a Data Base Task Group to develop the first database standard. In 1968, it released a report about COBOL extensions for databases. In 1971, it released the specification for the network model DBMS.
Charles W. Bachman, George G. Dodd, J.P. Fry, W.C. McGee, A. "Tax" Metaxides, T.W. Olle
Hierarchical, Inverted File, dBASE
Rockwell International and IBM developed Information Management System (IMS) in 1969 to manage data for NASA's Apollo program. IMS was the predominant IBM mainframe database management product for two decades and there are many IMS installations today. System Development Corporation developed LUCID (1967) and TDMS (1969) while MRI developed System 2000 (1970). Software AG developed Adabas and Burroughs developed DM-II (1974). dBASE was originally a product for 8-bit microcomputers but its use increased with the advent of the IBM PC and networks.
Wayne Ratliff
Relational technology grew from E. F. Codd's seminal work described in a 1970 ACM paper on relations. Relational purists find SQL to be flawed, but nonetheless, it gained favor in the 1980s and became a standard in 1986. There were updates to the SQL standard in 1989, 1992 and 1999.
R.F. Boyce, M. J. Carey, J. Celko, D. D. Chamberlin, D.L. Childs, E. F. Codd, C. J. Date, H. Darwen, D. DeWitt, R. Fagin, J. N. Gray, U. Gupta, D. Haderle, G. D. Held, R. Lorie, J. Melton, D. McGoveran, M. Stonebreaker, J.D. Ullman, E. Wong, S. B. Yao
In the 1980s and 1990s, object-oriented programming became popular. Many OOP enthusiasts advocated object databases as a persistent store for application objects. In 1993, the Object Data Management Group (ODMG) created the first standard for object databases.
Rick Cattell, Setrag Khoshafian, Won Kim, Mary Loomis
As database technology became more sophisticated and computing platforms gained processing power and disk space, new types of applications became feasible. Organizations built data warehouses and data marts and started using online-analytical processing (OLAP) software.
W.H. Inmon, Ralph Kimball, Kamran Parsaye
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Last update: March 29, 2005