History of Databases

An article by Jorge Reis    Comments Off

Databases go in hand in hand with the internet, computer software, and computer systems. Since the birth of the World Wide Web, information has become as valuable as gold. All the data that you see in the internet needs to have a logical structure so it could be published and read online. When we think of databases, many of us with no technical know-how will think that they were a recent invention. Databases have existed for thousands of years. Before computers were widely used, data was recorded with accounting systems by banks. Databases nowadays are more complicated than older systems, and they have come a long way since the early days of computing. They were managed by database systems that enabled data to be organized in a better structure for efficient use.

Older Database

In the early days of computing, the systems were linked to a custom database to provide speed. They were only used by big organizations for large sets of data. Apart from that, they were also very expensive because of the costs to make it. At that time, computers were still evolving, and the technology was fairly new, so they were considered as research projects. In the 1960s, as the computers developed more capabilities, general purpose databases appeared. Later on, a number of these database systems were used for commercial purposes.

During that time, navigational database systems were created. The Integrated Data Store created the Database Task Group which made a standard system known as the Codasyl Approach which then became the basis of other commercial databases. This approach used pointers that led to other pieces of data. The programmer has to go through these pointers one at a time until he finds the required record. The program has to go through the whole data set and collect the results. In the 1970s, relational database systems were conceived. Edgar Codd proposed a new system which used tables instead of a linked-list system. In the navigational database system, the data was placed in a single record, while on the relational database, it is normalized and placed in a table. This proposition is the basis of modern databases. As the memory capacity increased and prices of components decreased, more and more vendors began developing and creating databases to address different problems that started to appear. All computer hardwares were incorporated with database management systems. At first, the database was specific to the computer, but competitors start to develop their own database to offer alternative solutions. In the 90s, the focus changed from having an accurate database to easy maintainable system. Databases became more sophisticated as memory capacity grew to accommodate larger data sets.

Newer Database

Nowadays, modern databases are becoming more and more complex as more information is created and spread. There’s always another version around the corner, and the internet is a very fast-paced world. The focus now is making databases that are easy to maintain and to upgrade at lower costs in a least amount of time possible. Newer technologies are being developed to put human resources to better use.