Relational Database Management Systems: The Business Explosion

In the previous special issue of the Annals on relational database management systems (October-December 2012), we told the story of how the relational concept conceived of and published by E.F. (Ted) Codd was translated into practical products through work at IBM and Oracle, as well as by the University of California, Berkeley, which was then pursued by Ingres. But that was just the technological foundation for the industry, and the new early relational database management system (RDBMS) products were minor factors in what was already a rich database management systems industry using network and hierarchical concepts to store and retrieve data in virtually every industry, business, and government agency.

In This Issue

This issue tells the history of how the new, independent software companies and IBM built companies that supplanted the DBMS companies and their DBMS models in both query-oriented usage and in many transaction-processing applications. The story of this transformation is told in this issue of the Annals, which describes how each of these pioneering RDBMS companies developed and marketed their products to meet the relational challenge and how well they succeeded. The result was explosive business growth and creation of five companies, each with more than $1 billion in sales.

This special issue focuses on the growth of four of the leading RDBMS companies, with recollections by the pioneers about the history of the companies that they worked for: IBM, Oracle, Informix, and Sybase. (The business history of Ingres was covered in the previous RDBMS issue.) To provide a consistent framework for these recollections, we asked each of the authors to address these questions:

• • Where did the basic idea come from? Was it related to a particular application or user? What was the underlying technological approach? What were the special aspects of the product?

• • What was the business framework in which the RDBMS was developed? Where did the financing come from? What did it cost to produce and over what period of time? Who were the key developers?

• • How did the business case work out? Who were the first customers and for what applications? What were the revenues in the first few years? What was the sales model?

• • What happened later to the product? How was it enhanced? What were the major technical challenges? What platforms did it operate on? What was the market share?

• • What was the end result in terms of who ended up owning/running the company? If the company was sold, what was the value of the transaction?

As a result, we have the history of how each of these companies entered and succeeded in the relational database management marketplace. Each was unique in its approach from a technical, financial, marketing, and management standpoint. Each story is a mixture of business, technology, and marketing recollections, and together they present a picture of a worldwide competition to be the "top gun" in this software area of rapid growth and high profitability.

In addition, thanks to the assistance of Craig Partridge, former Annals Anecdotes editor, we have been able to enhance the issue by including two Anecdotes by industry pioneers on other RDBMS topics: Donald Deutsch describes the process of setting SQL standards, and Hershel Harris and Bert Nicol tell the history of SQL/DS, IBM's first RDBMS product. In addition, Rick Bennett tells the story of Oracle's targeted marketing advertisements.

Capturing Software and Services

This is the sixth special issue of the Annals edited or coedited by Luanne Johnson and myself, the cofounders of the Software Industry Special Interest Group (originally the Software History Center), which is now affiliated with the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. These issues have been supported by a wealth of material that has been collected since 2000 including transcripts of workshops, oral histories, personal stories, and other online and physical materials that reside at both the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and at the Computer History Museum. We are especially appreciative of the support from Tim Bergin, David Alan Grier, and Jeffrey R. Yost, the three previous editors in chief of the Annals...