RE: Difference Between DBMS/RDBMS

Dennis,

I agree with everything you said - especially with regard to Oracle and how they developed. Larry saw the benefit of not being tied to one vendor and quickly changed his code-base to C to accomplish this. That, and the adherance to supporting SQL was the biggest selling point - plus, people were tired of paying absolute top dollar for proprietary software tools to access their data. I remember paying $90,000 a year for a maintenance contract for Cobol on the Burroughs A-Frame machine. Ridiculous amount of money.

Along came Oracle. Pay them for the DB software, pick your own 3rd party development tool, and you were *way* ahead of the $ game.

Tom

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Tuesday, June 25, 2002 11:43 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

Tom

        I don't have the book here at work, so I'm doing this from memory. IBM created an experimental relational database named "System R", which is usually acknowledged as the first RDBMS. Being a large bureaucratic organization that was making a fortune on non-relational databases, IBM did not swiftly move the RDBMS to production status. I recall System R used SQL as its query language. The historical irony is that a small organization rushed its SQL-based product, Oracle, into production well ahead of IBM. How the dates relate to DEC, I'm not sure. Also, I believe that Oracle was only available on small systems for a long time. I feel your statement that DEC had the first RDBMS on large systems is probably correct. I think Oracle's strength in the early days was in proliferation (many small systems), not large systems.

I believe Oracle had four advantages which caused it to come out as the RDBMS leader:

1. VERY, VERY aggressive organization. At one time the industry leader was Ingres, now mostly a historical footnote. Read the book "The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison". Fortunately Oracle seems to have tempered its aggressiveness as it grew large, unlike Microsoft. Or maybe Oracle simply hasn't achieved the monopoly status.
2. Ported its product to many, many platforms.
3. Was not a proprietary product. Many hardware companies like DEC, HP, IBM were run by hardware people that felt the sole purpose of software was to sell more hardware. I know, I used to work for a hardware company. Independent companies like Oracle didn't have these handicaps.
4. Selected SQL as the interface language. As SQL emerged as the standard RDBMS query language, Oracle was well-positioned. Other excellent companies that happened to select query languages that were technically superior to SQL were forced into awkward migrations. Interested in any other recollections.

Dennis Williams
DBA
Lifetouch, Inc.
dwilliams_at_lifetouch.com

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Tuesday, June 25, 2002 9:08 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

Oh you bunch of young whipper-snappers!

A long time ago in a place far-away, we started with simple File Systems. Then came ISAM file systems.
These begate DBMS systems. Note there was no 'R' in original DBMS systems. Some of these were simply an extention to ISAM files that allowed (and demanded) a more formalized collection of files. In these files, there were tables and indexes and primary keys. I remember these as "Hierarchical Database Systems". Still no such thing as foreign keys.

Finally, I believe, DEC came out with the RBMS system which was (I know I will be corrected on this) one of the first Relational Database Managment Systems to be made available for large systems. (I have no knowledge of IBM products - anybody? When did DB2 make itself known?).

On PC's there was also something called RDB I think.

See, its good to be old!

Tom Mercadante
Oracle Certified Professional

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Tuesday, June 25, 2002 8:24 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

i give up the R, is that the difference?

joe

Santosh Varma wrote:

> could any body point me the difference(s) between DBMS and RDBMS ??
> because in DBMS also as in RDBMS, we can related two or more
> tables..if a column exists in another table for relation ??
>
> Thanks and regards,
>
> Santosh
>

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