from Hacker News

Henry Baker to the ACM on “Relational Databases” (1962)

by davegauer on 11/22/22, 7:20 PM with 3 comments

• by avrionov on 11/22/22, 10:18 PM

  The hacker news title says (1962), but the article is dated "October 15, 1991" and it references "Database Systems: Achievements and Opportunities" in the October, 1991, issue of the Communications.

• by jolux on 11/22/22, 11:19 PM

  The date here looks like it’s 1991, not 1962.

  Having matured as an engineer well into the age of cloud computing, I can’t speak from experience on whether the systems described were superior to relational databases. However the specific predictions made turned out wrong: contrary to the peak of OO hype in the 90s, object-oriented DBMSes mostly look like an irrelevant boondoggle in hindsight, and while use cases for non-relational systems have grown (e.g. Kafka, etcd, Redis), relational databases are as dominant as ever in core data processing workloads 30 years later.

• by DontchaKnowit on 11/22/22, 9:49 PM

  Would be very interested to hear a modern specialists perspective on this. Frankly, I always considered a well designed and maintained relational database to be a thing of beauty. Incredible intuitive and simple to utilize even for a semi technically competant layman.

  This seems overly critical. But maybe uve drank the cool aid?