25-year history of IBM DB2 Relational Database Service

With the development of relational databases, it has been nearly 40 years since the theory of relational models was proposed, the development of SQL query language, the establishment of performance tuning theory, and the maturity and prevalence of productization, IBM DB2, which claims to inherit this "conventional", has been in this history for 25 years. If the predecessor of DB2 SQL/DS is not included, oracle is almost the first commercial relational database product in history.

In addition, in the development history of database systems, many products that we are familiar with today are closely related to their R & D teams and founders.

Looking back at the 1970 s, some people, based on the prototype of different relational database systems, split these products or companies into two camps. One pulse is derived from the System R program of the IBM Research Institute, including DB2 and Oracle, which uses SEQUEL's query language. The other pulse is the Ingres company established by students at the University of Berkeley, California, it contains Ingres, Sybase, and so on, and uses the QUEL Query Language-from the source, Microsoft SQL Server is regarded as the branch. In fact, the origins of these two camps are still the System R plan, because the key is to put forward Pat Selinger of the query optimization theory. She brought Jim Gray into the development, jim Gray is an important scholar at the University of Berkeley, California. Later, the students of the school established a company to develop Ingres and Sybase.

In addition to relational models, are there any products developed based on other models?

In today's database system textbooks, we can also see the Network Model and Hierarchical Model). The former products are relatively unknown, and the latter is IBM's IMS.

Later, the so-called Object-Oriented Model and Object-Relational Model (Object-Relational Model) were introduced. For Object-based Relational databases, as long as they followed the SQL: 1999 standard, are recognized as this type, including IBM DB2, Oracle database, and Microsoft SQL Server.

For IBM DB2, there are many practices that will improve the availability of relational data systems and facilitate program development in the future. From Fu luqin, Senior Technical Manager of the IBM Silicon Valley lab, we gradually learned about the environmental restrictions of DB2 at various stages of the software lifecycle and the development focus at that time.

Fu Yuqin participated in the development of DB2 For Linux Unix and WindowsLUW from version 2nd to version 6th, and DB2 For z/OS from version 7th to version 9th. He also led the relevant development teams, he emphasizes that every successful software goes through 10 ~ There must be a big change in the past 15 years.

People have a long vision, and the original design of the product cannot be changed, because developers cannot imagine the software format and competition situation 10 years later. Even if enterprises all agree that the software is of good quality and flexible, it can also be widely used and will remain old after its validity period expires. He is proud to say that most of the software cannot survive for so long, so there will be no such problem. the more successful the software will have a second spring, the more time it will take!

In his observation, new functions were quickly expanded during the early stages of DB2's development. On the one hand, the development team was able to spend all their effort on new features because there were few users. Later, the number of users increased, and the system had to be more cautious in modification, so it was not necessary to randomly add program code.

At the time of Research and Development of DB2 8th versions, IBM was determined to execute a large-scale adjustment plan. At that time, Fu xiaoqin moved from LUW to z/OS. In the current version of DB2, he believes that the current DB2 is in the state of just completing Reengineering. He estimates that five to ten years later, DB2 will re-execute the same transformation program.

What Will DB2 develop next?

There is a tool worth special attention. It is database-related, but not a database product-IBM Data Studio, which claims to be able to handle all database-related development work, it includes the design stage, test environment stage, deployment, monitoring, and management. A series of tools are all integrated into this tool. It supports Eclipse, IBM Rational, and Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. One of its features, pureQuery, is similar to Microsoft's LINQ, but is called JLinQ. It is said to contain the main functions of LINQ and is based on a pure Java platform.

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