Evolution of Databases

By Eric Rodrigo Muñoz

Evolution of Databases

According to the definition from Wordreference, “a database is a collection of organised, related data in electronic form that can be gathered, analysed or retrieved by a computer”. So electronics generate data, and databases are able to storage and manage this information with many different purposes.

But why humans have the need to storage information? When databases were originated? What is the future of them? We will go through all this question in this blogpost. Shall we start?

History of Databases

Types of models

• Type 1: Hierarchical model

In this model, data is organised like an organisational chart. So it works like an inverted tree, and the top is known as ROOT. Each rectangle represents an entity, such as “director”, “manager” and “worker” and represents parent/child relationships (which ones are subordinate to another, according to the hierarchy). For a database, an entity is the equivalent of a table, and the information is spread throughout the columns and rows. 

Each child can only have one parant, so for example a certain number or “workers” are attributed to “Manager 1” [1:N relationship = one to many].

Drawbacks of this type: It can’t represent all the relationships between the data and is difficult to modify. 

• Type 2: Network model

Developed to overcome some of the problem from the prior model because its flexibility in representing objects and their relationships. Though is more difficult to maintain, any item can be related to another one, which makes a clear picture to represent the reality.  

• Type 3: Relational model

The prior two models are complex and inflexible and due to the difficulty to expand or modify the database model, the relational model was born. As mentioned, this model represents the data in the form of tables (idea of Pivot Tables of Excel) to represent relations. An easy example:

An activity code to represent a specific activity, but also having other data such the date and other category named Route No., as illustrated in the following tables.  

The arrows represents how data can be shown and represented in different ways connected by two-dimensional tables. 

Future of databases

Every company needs real-time data to improve and make efficient use of the data for its own benefit and to improve the user experience. The problems that we are facing nowadays is the cost and efforts to manage all this data with a single system and the nature of the information itself (which can change really fast, like the markets trends and such). 

Some of the expected futures for the evolution of databases are the cloud database platforms that are able to access to broader ranges of workloads and capabilities. 

Another direction that database systems are taking is being able to access and manage this massive pools of informations that we have in our current times.

Lastly but not least, databases systems might be able to be really flexible in order to add and modify data, even being able to change in real time, which will enhance (for instance) the weather forecasting or other kind of services.

References

Quick Base (Ed.). (n.d.). A Timeline of Database History. Retrieved November 1, 2019, from https://www.quickbase.com/articles/timeline-of-database-history.

The Future of Database Technology. (2019, October 15). Retrieved November 1, 2019, from https://innovationmanagement.se/2018/05/09/the-future-of-database-technology/.

Colleges, P. G. O. (2017, June 21). What is Database Models, Hierarchical Model, Network Model. Retrieved November 1, 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6G8oCaOU28.