Early Databases

In the 1960s, the System Development Corporation, one of the world’s first computer software companies and a significant military technology contractor, first used the term “data base” to describe a system to manage United States Air Force personnel. The term “databank” had also been used in the 1960s to describe similar systems, but the public seemed less accepting of that term and eventually adopted the word “database”, which is universally used today.

A number of corporations, notably with IBM and Rockwell at the forefront, developed database software throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. MUMPS (also known as M), developed by a team at Massachusetts General Hospital in the late 1960s, was the first programming language developed specifically to make use of database technology.

In 1970, the relational database model was born. Although this model was more theoretical than practical at the time, it took hold in the database community as soon as the necessary processing power was available to implement such systems.

The advent of the relational model paved the way for Ingres and System R, which were developed at the University of California at Berkeley and IBM, respectively, in 1976. These two database systems and the fundamental ideas upon which they were built evolved into the databases we use today. Oracle and DB2, two other very popular database platforms, followed in the footsteps of Ingres and System R in the early 1980s.

Modern Databases

The Ingres system developed at Berkeley spawned some of the professional database systems we see today, such as Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, and PostgreSQL.

Now, PostgreSQL is arguably the most advanced and fastest free database system available, and it is widely used for generic and specific database applications alike. MySQL is another free database system used in roughly the same scope of applications as PostgreSQL. While MySQL is owned and developed by a single company, MySQL AB in Sweden, PostgreSQL has no central development scheme, and its development relies on the contributions of software developers around the world.

IBM’s System R database was the first to use the Structured Query Language (SQL), which is also widely used today. System R, itself, however, was all but abandoned by IBM in favor of focusing on more powerful database systems like DB2 and, eventually, Informix. These products are now generally used in large-scale database applications. For example, the Wal-Mart chain of large department stores has been a customer of both DB2 and Informix for many years.

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