history
origins
- 1960’s: network and hierarchical databases
- 1970: Codd invents the relational model; revolutionizes the field
- early 1980’s: IBM starts DB2, Oracle founded
growth
- late 1980’s: RDBs become big business: Oracle, Sybase, Ingres, Informix, etc
- 1997: Oracle’s revenue is $5B, total RDB market about $10-15B
future
- object-oriented databases unlikely to take off
- but hybrid ‘object-relational databases’ are starting to get popular