Storage Technology Becomes System R


A second historical period that I consider very important is IBM's research from 1973 through 1976. During those years , IBM staff at the San Jose Research Center (Dr. Codd's base), worked on System R . System R was the experimental relational database they were trying to build according to Dr. Codd's theories . Codd's team did develop a successful prototype relational system that could do ad hoc reporting and transaction processing. SEQUEL (Structured English Query Language) was the database language that they created as the interface to the experimental System R database. Because of trademark laws, the name SEQUEL was changed to SQL .

Interestingly, the System R scientists were initially at odds with IBM. At that time, IBM had a very popular and successful database, IMS. IMS was a true hierarchical database, the very design Dr. Codd had called inadequate. During the mid-1970s there was quite a disagreement at IBM over which database should take precedence. IBM had already gone its own independent way in 1968, when it decided not to support the CODASYL [1] product, instead going ahead with its own IMS product. IMS became a solid commercial success and a major IBM product.

[1] CODASYL is the acronym for Conference on Data Systems Languages. Founded in 1957 by the U.S. Department of Defense, it was created to develop computer programming languages, and it was the group responsible for developing COBOL. The group no longer exists.

In reality no one, including Dr. Codd, realized that his first paper, and the subsequent laboratory experiments with System R, were the beginning of a revolution within IBM and within the technical community. In the early days of investigation of his RDBMS, Dr. Codd and his work were actually labeled as contrary to IBM's company goals. Dr. Codd eventually went head to head with Charles Bachman, spokesman for the CODASYL database design, and the outcome was a government-sponsored project ( funded by the military and the National Science Foundation [NSF]) at the University of California at Berkeley. The two groups, Dr. Codd's at IBM and the UC-Berkeley group, both competed with each other and reinforced each other's efforts.

Although System R did eventually prove to be a data-independent , high-level database, as Dr. Codd had predicted , it did not on its own convince IBM to abandon IMS in favor of relational databases. IBM was still promoting IMS as the corporate database, in spite of the successes at UC-Berkeley and at San Jose. After all, wasn't San Jose supposed to be IBM's center for disk storage development, not database research?

It took the dissemination of source code from the UC-Berkeley group to get IBM's attention. As we all know, once source code gets out into the technical community, unexpected things start to happen. By then, Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, had learned of SQL through publications from the System R team, and he had developed and was already marketing his version of SQL. Simultaneously, other companies began to appear, such as Ingres and Informix, along with established companies such as Software AG, all promoting the RDBMS, along with SQL.

Finally, in 1980, under the threat of being bypassed in the marketplace , IBM came out with its own version of SQL: SQL/DS for mainframes. During the same year Codd was awarded the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Turing award. And the world of databases has not been the same ever since. Today, SQL is accepted as the standard RDBMS language.



Guerrilla Oracle
Guerrilla Oracle: The Succinct Windows Perspective
ISBN: 0201750775
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 84

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