HACKER Q&A
📣 wlnirvana

Any Literature on History of Database?


There seem to be a lot of texts on history of computing, internet/web and OS. Are there any counterparts in database?

  👤 gregjor Accepted Answer ✓
Chris Date’s book “An Introduction to Database Systems” is a good place to start. It focuses on relational databases, which reflects the dominance of relational database systems for decades now.

Wikipedia has a decent article with history:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database

Before relational database systems we had a lot of proprietary setups based on disk files. There were the variants of the hashing-based Pick database. There was CODASYL, and IBM’s IMS. Relational databases pretty much replaced all of those, though Pick-style systems are still running here and there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system