Re: Network databases

some more from
http://www.mcjones.org/System_R/SQL_Reunion_95/sqlr95-System.html

Don Chamberlin: I think it's going to need both of us to do this. I'll give it a start.

This shouldn't be a monologue; please stand up and help me out here. As Irv said, there was a long period after Frank arrived in California when we had a lot of meetings and a lot of discussions and task forces and tried to organize an approach to take to this business. Interestingly enough, Ted Codd didn't participate in that as much as you might expect. He got off into natural language processing and wrote a very large APL program called Rendezvous[24], [25]. He really didn't get involved in the nuts and bolts of System R very much. I think he may have wanted to maintain a certain distance from it in case we didn't get it right. Which I think he would probably say we didn't.

Mike Blasgen: Oh, he has said that, many times.

Don Chamberlin: What came out of this was we got organized into two groups, a higher-level group which ultimately was called the RDS[26] and which was interested mainly in language issues, and a lower-level group called the Research Storage System, which was interested more in physical data management issues. I can talk mainly about what was happening in the top half of the project in those days and I'm hoping that Irv and maybe some of the rest of you - Jim - will talk about what was happening in the bottom half.

What really happened in the early days was Irv's group began developing a new data management interface, with support for indexes, locking, logging, concurrency and transactions, and all those kinds of things. Meanwhile the language folks wanted to build a prototype of their language and they needed a base to build it on, and the RSS wasn't ready. The only thing we could get our hands on was something that Raymond Lorie had built at the Cambridge Scientific Center called XRM. So we built a prototype of our language on top of XRM in the early days; we called it Phase Zero 27. Brad has a wonderful tape which many of you saw last night that represents a complete working prototype of SEQUEL in 1976 I believe, complete with integrity assertions, which have just now made it into the product twenty years later. [laughter] And we demonstrated that, or at least showed the tape, at the SIGMOD conference in, was it 1976?

... snip ...

home page for above ..
http://www.mcjones.org/System_R/

going way back ... some of the ctss people went to 4th floor, 545 tech sq, to the science center ... and others went to 5th floor, 545 tech sq to do multics
(aka gml/sgml was invented at the science center as well as lots of
other stuff on the 4th floor ... and on the 5th floor was multics and bunch of other stuff).

eariliest released relational was on multics

multics reference page
http://www.multicians.org/

reference to multics relational data store, released in 1976 http://www.mcjones.org/System_R/mrds.html

from above:

Multics Relational Data Store (MRDS)

The Multics Relational Data Store (MRDS) was first released in June 1976. This is believed to be the first relational database management system offered by a major computer vendor, namely Honeywell Information Systems, Incorporated. The designers were familiar with, and influenced by, the work of Codd, the Ingres project at U.C. Berkeley, and the System R project at IBM San Jose.

MRDS provided a command-level interface for defining databases and views (called data submodels), and a call-level interface for queries and data manipulation. A separate Logical Inquiry and Update System
(LINUS) provided an online query and update interface. The MRDS query
language was similar to SEQUEL (as SQL was first called), with -range, -select, and -where clauses corresponding approximately to the FROM, SELECT, and WHERE clauses of SQL. Explicit set operations
(intersection, union, and difference) were provided; there was no
direct sorting support. A query was passed as a character string to the MRDS at runtime; there was no precompilation mechanism. Concurrent access to a database by multiple processes was supported; each process was required to explicitly declare the type of access (retrieval or update) and, for update, the scope (set of relations) of the update. The database could be quiesced and backed up in its entirety. A transaction mechanism for atomically committing multiple updates was added in a later release.

As its name implies, MRDS ran on the Multics operating system, and its implementation took advantage of Multics mechanisms for security and virtual memory-based storage. MRDS was written in PL/1.

When MRDS was released in June 1976, it was actually marketed as one of two components of a package called the Multics Data Base Manager
(MDBM). The other component was the Multics Integrated Data Store
(MIDS), which was a CODASYL database implemented as a layer on top of
MRDS. MRDS was designed by James A. Weeldreyer <Jim.Weeldreyer_at_iac.honeywell.com> and Oris D. Friesen <oris_at_orisfriesen.com>; Roger D. Lackey and Richard G. Luebke contributed to the implementation.

References
James A. Weeldreyer and Oris D. Friesen. "Multics Relational Data Store: An Implementation of A Relational Data Base Manager" Proceedings of the Eleventh Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences Volume 1, (January 1978), pages 52-66.

Oris D. Friesen and James A. Weeldreyer. "Multics Integrated Data Store: An Implementation of a Network Data Base Manager Utilizing Relational Data Base Methodology. Proceedings of the Eleventh Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Volume 1 (January 1978), pages 67-84.

Oris D. Friesen, N.S. Davids, and Rickie E. Brinegar. "MRDS/LINUS: System Evaluation" in J. W. Schmidt and M. L. Brodie, editors. Relational Database Systems: Analysis and Comparison. Berlin, Springer-Verlag (1983), pages 182-220.

Honeywell Information Systems. Series 60 (Level 68). Multics Relational Data Store (MRDS) Reference Manual, Order Number AW53, 1980.

Honeywell Information Systems. Series 60 (Level 68). Logical Inquiry and Update System (Linus) Reference Manual, Order Number AZ49, 1980.

"Honeywell Introduces Multics Data Base Management" Software Digest 8, 35 (September 2, 1976), pages 2-3.

Don Leavitt. "'MDBM' Backs Network, Relational Approaches" ComputerWorld 10?, 35? (September 6, 1976), page 11.

"Honeywell Introduces Data Base Management for Multics 68" Electronic News 21, 1096 (September 6, 1976), page 28. Received on Fri Jan 14 2005 - 15:35:05 CET