The Development of Databases and Their Relevancy

A database at its fundamental level is a collection of datum, or facts and statistics. Without context or accessibility, data has no value to employees or firms. A library is the most traditional form of a database whereby people can go find a relevant book pertaining to a relevant subject. However, using computers, databases have become organized and machine readable. The implications of this are that users can look up terms and use variables to access the most relevant information. [1]

The relational data model was invented in 1970 by C. F. Codd. [2] The invention of this model has enabled researchers to understand the theory of data/relationship/ constraint. It has also allowed for many database design methods and the development of the standard database access language. In addition to these things, all commercial modern database systems are based on the 1970 model.

An example of one of the modern access language models is the eXtensible Markup Language or (XML). It has become the standard form of data exchange over the internet. The implementation of this model has led to another form of data management which is storing the XML documents. Researchers have suggested using relational data systems to satisfy this need. [3]

The use of databases has enabled users to quickly and efficiently find data. This ability allows for average people, professionals, and researchers to streamline the process of finding data and implementing it to create, learn, and teach. The advancement of the database makes humans more productive and creates less chance of misinformation. As the development of new concepts become published, databases become more robust and up to date using machine updating. Meaning that humans do not have to worry themselves with trying to keep up with the everchanging world of research articles and the like.

Sources:

[1] Roman, Steven. Access Database Design & Programming. O'Reilly, 1999.

[2] Darwen, Hugh. An Introduction to Relational Database Theory. Ventus Publishing, 2009.

[3] Tatarinov, Igor, et al. “Storing and Querying Ordered XML Using a Relational Database System.” Proceedings of the 2002 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data - SIGMOD '02, 2002, doi:10.1145/564712.564715.

Comments:

Harvin Bhandal: I find the maintenance and updating of databases interesting. SQL seems like a very powerful tool that creates an intuitive way to access data. I’m interested to see how algorithms will change in the future to match our diction to optimize search results from person to person.

Alynne Jeanty: It’s important to eliminate the need to use separate databases to find information that could be kept under one database. The implementation of the relational database theory seems like a very important development to eliminate the need to use multiple databases.

Julie Anderson: Your explanation of how rational databases was very informative. The tables helped get your point across effectively. I’d be interested to hear more about how this applies to Building Information technology. Hopefully in the future, we will have tools that will fill out all of the information automatically!