EEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 35 Number 2, April-June 2013
This special issue (part 2 of a series which began with the special issue in October–December 2012) tells the history of how IBM and several new, independent software companies built companies that supplanted the database management system companies and their DBMS models in both query-oriented usage and in many transaction-processing applications. The story of this transformation describes how each of these pioneering relational database management 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 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. Burton Grad was the guest editor.
The articles and the authors of each are listed below. Click on the name of the author(s) to see an abstract of the article on the IEEE website.
Burton Grad, Guest Editors’ Introduction: Relational Database Management Systems: The Business Explosion
Andrew Mendelsohn, The Oracle Story
Rick Bennett, Oracle Marketing: Killer Ads
Bob Epstein, History of Sybase
Roger Sippl, Informix: Information Management on UNIX
Donald J. Haderle and Cynthia M. Saracco, The History and Growth of IBM’s DB2
Marilyn Bohl, Product Managing DB2’s Early Development
Hershel Harris and Bert Nicol, SQL/DS: IBM’s First RDBMS
Donald R. Deutsch, The SQL Standard: How It Happened