Db

To understand where DB technology is going, you must know where it came from.

To appreciate where we are, we must look at where we started. To understand where DB technology is going, you

The 1960s – Navigating the Network: The first databases were navigational, using hierarchical structures (like a family tree) or network structures. IBM’s IMS (Information Management System) is a classic example. While revolutionary, these systems were rigid; if you wanted to view the data differently, you often had to rebuild the entire DB. IBM’s IMS (Information Management System) is a classic

The 1970s – The Relational Revolution: Edgar F. Codd, a British computer scientist working for IBM, proposed the relational model. Instead of trees or networks, data was stored in tables (relations) with rows and columns. This gave birth to the RDBMS (Relational Database Management System). Oracle, founded in 1979, became the first commercial RDBMS. Codd, a British computer scientist working for IBM,

The 1990s – The Rise of SQL: Structured Query Language (SQL) became the standard for interacting with relational DBs. During the client-server era, databases like Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL became the backbone of everything from banking to logistics.

The 2010s – NoSQL and the Cloud: The explosion of Big Data and real-time web applications exposed the limits of rigid SQL tables. This led to the "NoSQL" movement, introducing document stores (MongoDB), key-value stores (Redis), and wide-column stores (Cassandra). Simultaneously, cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure turned the DB into a utility service (DBaaS – Database as a Service).

A modern attempt to combine the scalability of NoSQL with the ACID guarantees of relational DBs. Example: Google Spanner, CockroachDB.