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DB2 is 25: Data-driven DSS

Brian Prince wrote an analysis in eWeek of June 16, 2008 titled "DB2 at 25". Time flies when you are having fun. I was a new Assistant Professor at University of Maryland in College Park when DB2 was released. My database course at UW-Madison had been based on Date's book and I had heard of Oracle, but all of a sudden IBM had a relational database product. Just as IBM legitimized the PC so too with relational databases.

Prior to 1983, we had data-driven DSS, but the database component was small and specialized. Perhaps data was in an array accessed by APL or data was in a networked or hierarchical database. Without RDBMS and parallel processing we would have very different data-driven decision support today.

According to Wikipedia, "The name DB2 was first given to the Database Management System or DBMS in 1983 when IBM released DB2 on its MVS mainframe platform. Prior to this, a similar product was named SQL/DS on the VM mainframe. The earlier System 38 platform also contained a relational DBMS. System Relational, or System R, was a research prototype developed in the 1970s. DB2 has its roots back to the beginning of the seventies when Dr. E.F. Codd, working for IBM, described the theory of relational databases and in June of 1970 published the model for data manipulation."

"In mid 2006, IBM announced "Viper," which is the codename for DB2 9 on both distributed platforms and z/OS. DB2 9 for z/OS was announced in early 2007. IBM claims that the new DB2 will be the first relational database to store XML "natively". Other enhancements include OLTP-related improvements for distributed platforms, business intelligence/data warehousing-related improvements for z/OS. ..."

Happy birthday!

References

Codd, E.F., "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks". Communications of the ACM 13 (6): 1970, pp. 377–387.

Prince, B., "DB2 at 25," eWeek, Vol. 25, No. 19, June, 16, 2008, p. 26.

Wikipedia, "Edgar F. Codd," URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_F._Codd .

Wikipedia, "IBM DB2," URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_DB2 .

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