Fifty Years of Data Management and Beyond

Preface

Why did we produce this report? There are a number of popular data management frameworks, all of which offer different trade-offs. Most of these evolved over time to fit specific needs. Looking at that history, just about every decade the industry undergoes significant changes related to data. New forms of data frameworks emerge, are deployed, and tend to stay in production. The resulting technology landscape can be confusing. This report examines that history, showing when and why specific technologies became popular. The point is to help make sense of the landscape.

In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan explained that new media emerge continually and that older media become their content, instead of being replaced. Television shows about movie reviews are a good example. Likewise, new data access patterns will continue to emerge, with new problems confronted each decade, or faster. They aren’t likely to replace earlier data access patterns; rather, they will make them richer and more complex. Consequently, as a person who’s learning about data frameworks, don’t feel obligated to use everything or always use the latest technology. Use what applies best to the business use case at hand. Hopefully, this report can help introduce that technology landscape so that you can learn which tools fit the different use cases.

Introduction

Over the past 50 years, a wide variety of different frameworks have been used in industry for managing data. ...