SQL and Database Management:
One of the major tasks of a computer system is to store and manage data. To handle this
task, specialized computer programs known as database management systems began to
appear in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A database management system, or DBMS,
helped computer users to organize and structure their data and allowed the computer
system to play a more active role in managing the data. Although database management
systems were first developed on large mainframe systems, their popularity has spread to
minicomputers, personal computers, workstations, and specialized server computers.
Database management also plays a key role in the explosion of computer networking and
the Internet. Early database systems ran on laarge, monolithic computer systems, where
the data, the database management software, and the user or application program
accessing the database all operated on the same system. The 1980s and 1990s saw the
explosion of a new, client/server model for database access, in which a user on a
personal computer or an application program accessed a database on a separate
computer system using a network. In the late 1990s, the increasing popularity of the
Internet and the World Wide Web intertwined the worlds of networking and data
management even further. Now users require little more than a web browser to access
and interact with databases, not only within their own organizations, but around the world.
Today, database management is very big business. Independent software companies
and computer vendors ship billions of dollars worth of database management products
every year. Computer industry experts say that mainframe and minicomputer database
products each account for about 10 to 20 percent of the database market, and personal
computer and server-based database products account for 50 percent or more. Database
servers are one of the fastest-growing segments of the computer systems market, driven
by database installations on Unix and Windows NT-based servers. Database
management thus touches every segment of the computer market.
Since the late 1980s a specific type of DBMS, called a relational database management
system (RDBMS), has become so popular that it is the standard database form. Relational
databases organize data in a simple, tabular form and provide many advantages over
earlier types of databases. SQL is specifically a relational database language used to work
with relational databases.
