Appendix A

Historical Antecedents

In the beginning, there were data files… and from the need to manage the data stored in those files arose a variety of data management methods, most of which preceded the relational data model and, because of their shortcomings, paved the way for the acceptance of relational databases.

This appendix provides an overview of data management organizations used prior to the introduction of the relational data model. Although you do not need to read this appendix to understand the main body of this book, some of the case studies in Part III mention concepts discussed here. You will also find that NoSQL DBMSs (discussed in Chapter 28) share some characteristics with the older data models.

File Processing Systems

The ...

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