Funding a Revolution Government Support for Computing Research (1999) / Chapter Skim
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6 The Rise of Relational Databases
6 The Rise of Relational Databases
Pages 157-168
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From page 157... ...
The case studies of relational databases and the Internet, for example, are relatively narrow in the sense that they trace the development of a particular technology or system. The innovations described have a fairly well defined beginning and end, although clearly the systems described in each will continue to evolve over time.
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From page 158... ...
The case studies themselves do not attempt to discuss the relevance of these lessons to the current policy environment or to provide guidance regarding future federal support for research in computing. That task is taken up instead in Chapter 5 of this report, which synthesizes the lessons from all the case studies and attempts to consider their more general applicability.
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From page 159... ...
Much of today's market consists of relational databases based on the model proposed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This chapter provides 159
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From page 160... ...
that disseminated the idea widely and gave it the intellectual legitimacy required for broad acceptance and commercialization. This case study does not address the entire database field (it omits topics such as transaction processing, distributed databases, and multimedia)
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From page 161... ...
, incorporating a number of prior data-definition languages (Fry and Sibley, 1974~. Magnetic disk drives, which could access data at random, began to replace magnetic tape drives, which required serial data access, for online storage.
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From page 162... ...
should only recognize simple commands and it would be up to the users to put together appropriate commands for finding what was needed" (Coda, 1.2 In a series of IBM technical reports and then a landmark paper, "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks," Codd laid out a new way to organize and access data. What Codd called the "relational model" rested on two key points: It provides a means of describing data with its natural structure onlythat is, without superimposing any additional structure for machine representation purposes.
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From page 163... ...
Internal politics further compounded the situation, as IBM was not accustomed to major software innovations coming from IBM San lose, which until then had worked primarily on disk storage. In spite of IBM's reaction, Codd spoke out zealously and promoted the virtues of the relational model to computer scientists.
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From page 164... ...
IBM and its customers still had strong vested interests in the established IMS technology. It took outside efforts, funded by the government, to prove that relational databases could become viable commercial products.
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From page 165... ...
Continued movement of Ingres researchers throughout the database community spread the technology even farther. Terry Held and Carol Youseffi moved from UC-Berkeley to Tandem Computers Incorporated, where they built a relational system, the predecessor to NonStop SQL.
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From page 166... ...
Related research in information retrieval, multimedia, scientific databases, and digital libraries is under way, supported by DARPA, NSF, and the National Library of Medicine, among others. Still, the history of the emergence of relational database technologies, products, and companies reveals a good deal about innovation in computing and communications.
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From page 167... ...
This case history also suggests that the large numbers of researchers passing through university laboratories, their willingness to share data and code, and their publication imperatives make university researchers ideal sources of technology transfer to the broader technical community. Industrial laboratories, by comparison, rarely place significant technologies directly into the public domain and have lower rates of personnel turnover, although they often benefit from greater and more stable supplies of resources.
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From page 168... ...
km Gray moved from IBM to Tandem, where he worked on NonStop SQL, and he is now the senior database researcher at Microsoft. Franco Putzolu also went from IBM to Tandem, where he was a principal designer of NonStop SQL, and later went to Oracle as a senior database architect.
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