[Music] our lives are flooded with all kinds of information thanks to computer databases we interact with information easily and seamlessly on a daily basis databases were used to organize information long before the computer age this sumerian tablet is an index of medical prescriptions ship manifests card catalogs and product inventories are also databases the computer allowed databases to be automated early computer databases followed a flat file model a simple consecutive list of Records but this format required that computers begin every search at the start of the list and search sequentially this was a slow way to
search and maintain large volumes of Records new faster databases were needed that were expandable reliable and efficient in the mid-1960s IBM used a hierarchical model for their information management system IMS this tree like structure was parent notes pointing to child nodes was successfully used by NASA to manage drawings for the lunar lander a more flexible network model was developed by g e--'s charles bachmann now child nodes could have multiple parents but as the database got complicated it was too hard to manage all those pointers Ted Codd a computer scientist at IBM had a better idea
his relational database model which he first proposed in 1970 organized a body of data into simple tables of related information there were no pointers to maintain because tables are connected only by having matching data fields this made it easier to access merge and change data see JDate an IBM instructor and author was convinced that the relational database was a better model Cod and date wrote papers lectured and debated its merits but Cod's relational database competed with another IBM product the profitable IMS so IBM was slow to support the new idea in 1973 Michael Stonebraker x'
team at UC Berkeley used Kahn's idea to create the ingress relational database making it freely available for a modest fee several companies used it as the basis for successful commercial products [Music] it took until 1975 for IBM to produce an experimental relational database named system R it used a structured query language developed by IBM's Don Chamberlin and Raymond Boyce to search and modify data a young entrepreneur named Larry Ellison was also intrigued with cods ideas in 1977 he put up $2,000 of his own money to start a software company with Bob miner and add oats
their mission developed and sell the first commercially available relational database compatible with IBM system are their flagship product was Oracle which shipped in 1979 the first version ran on many computers but by 1983 the company had rewritten it to run on many more computer systems including IBM PCs and mainframes Oracle quickly became profitable in 1983 IBM finally released a full-fledged commercial relational database db2 for mainframes but it was too late for IBM to dominate the mini computer market and Oracle was already selling to IBM's customers Oracle had adopted Ted Cod's relational database concept early when
his own employer IBM wouldn't and Oracle became one of the largest software companies in the world its success helped relational databases become the way much of our computer data is organized working communicating shopping relaxing nearly everywhere we go data is gathered organized and made accessible in this age of information a database is never far away [Music] you
