Founding the Future
Like a lot of technologies in the computer industry, the foundations of relational databases can be tracked back to IBM in the 1960's and 70's, and their research into automating office functions. It was during this period in history that firms discovered that it was becoming far too expensive to hire the number of people required do certain jobs, such as storing and indexing files, and that it was worth the investment to fund research into to cheaper, and more efficient mechanical solutions.
A large amount of research was conducted during this period, with the hierarchical, network and relational models being invented along with a large number of other database models and a lot of the computer technology which is in use today.
In 1970 an IBM researcher named Ted Codd published the first article on relational databases. …
