Pebbles to Papyrus to Punched Cards - The Ever Evolving Database

"Just wait, Gretel, until the moon rises, and then we shall see the crumbs of bread which I have strewn about, they will show us our way home again."

 Hansel and Gretel (Brothers)

A sad scene in a fairy tale, a disaster in real life. Like Hansel or Gretel, if you have data at your disposal, but it is simply crude pile, where you can’t associate one datum with the next, then you don’t have information. Disorganized data like vulnerable perishable food is cumbersome and quickly becomes an unusable commodity, devoid of providing long-term benefits. Molding information out of data by laying out tables and building database is an art form that we now call Database Management System (DBMS).

       DBMS’s are everywhere; in your cell phone to your GPS’s to satellites hovering in space. And who can forget the luxurious convenience of package tracking? Whether you waiting for an impulse buy off the internet or a confidential document , your belonging, as it moves from one station to another, one hand to another, from one airport to the next, the assurance, as MasterCard says, is “priceless”. This modern day miracle which has become a necessity and a vital part of every courier service is made possible by DBMS technology.

       There are many approaches to creating a DBMS: hierarchical, network, relational and object oriented.Hierarchical model organizes the data in a top to bottom tree-like structure. Retrieving data is a quick affair that is, it is a speedy system but maintenance is cumbersome.  IMS, Information Management System is probably the most famous hierarchical model. 

       The network model, sometimes informally called the "star model' also adopts a navigational approach like hierarchical. However, since several paths are possible, it is less restrictive. Hierarchical and network are the least used DBMS's approaches. The relational model uses rows and columns to store data; in other words it employs a table structure. The tables of records that are generated "connect" with each other via common relationship values. This model is most commonly used today. MySQL, DB2, Oracle are examples of relational model DBMS's. The object oriented structure is most suitable for multimedia based applications. It works well with JAVA and C++, and hence the name object oriented.

       Database management has changed many mediums; from pebbles to papyrus to punched cards, from tapes to magnetic discs. Nevertheless the pursuit for a flawless DBMS continues; one that caters to usability and the data melting-pot. Saul Wurman, the celebrated information architect in his book Information Anxiety published in 1989 wrote, “A weekday edition of the New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in seventeenth-century England.” and “The amount of information now doubles every five years; soon it will be doubling every four...” and “Today, the English language contains roughly 500,000 usable words, five times more than the time of Shakespeare.” (Wurman)

       IT (pun intended) is no longer an information highway but a superhighway with dwindling security alley ways. In corporate society where data has become a tangible commodity, where our information is networked directly or indirectly with the internet and fears of identity theft are on everyones mind, DBMS’s need to be developed to be ‘faster, higher and stronger’.

References

Brothers, Grimm. "Short Stories: Hansel and Gretel." East Of The

    Web. N.p., Feb 2000. Web. 8 Jul 2012.

not defined. Trail of Bread Crumbs. Graphic. TV Tropes

Wurman, Richard S. Information Anxiety. New York: Doubleday, 1989. Print.