SQL on Unix-Based Systems:
SQL has firmly established itself as the data management solution of choice for Unixbased
computer systems. Originally developed at Bell Laboratories, Unix became very
popular in the 1980s as a vendor-independent, standard operating system. It runs on a
wide range of computer systems, from workstations to mainframes, and has become the
standard operating system for scientific and engineering applications.
In the early 1980s four major databases were already available for Unix systems. Two of
them, Ingres and Oracle, were Unix versions of the products that ran on DEC's
proprietary minicomputers. The other two, Informix and Unify, were written specifically for
Unix. Neither of them originally offered SQL support, but by 1985 Unify offered a SQL
query language, and Informix had been rewritten as Informix-SQL, with full SQL support.
Today, Oracle, Informix, and Sybase dominate the Unix-based database market and are
available on all of the leading Unix systems. Unix-based database servers are a
mainstream building block for both client/server and three-tier Internet architectures. The
constant search for higher SQL database performance has driven some of the most
important trends in Unix system hardware. These include the emergence of symmetric
multiprocessing (SMP) as a mainstream server architecture, and the use of RAID
(Redundant Array of Independent Disk) technology to boost I/O performance.
