Database Reference
In-Depth Information
The story of data accessibility could start with the IT version of the Cambrian
explosion: in other words, the incredible rise of the personal computer. With the launch
of products like the Apple II and, later, the Windows platform, millions of users gained
the ability to process and analyze data (not a lot of data, by today's standards) quickly
and affordably. In the world of business, spreadsheet tools such as VisiCalc for the Apple
II and Lotus 1-2-3 for Windows PCs were the so-called killer apps that helped drive
sales of personal computers as tools to address business and research data needs. Hard
drive costs dropped, processor speeds increased, and there was no end to the amount
of applications available for data processing, including software such as Mathematica,
SPSS, Microsoft Access and Excel, and thousands more.
However, there's an inherent limitation to the amount of data that can be processed
using a personal computer; these systems are limited by their amount of storage and
memory and by the ability of their processors to process the data. Nevertheless, the
personal computer made it possible to collect, analyze, and process as much data as
could fit in whatever storage the humble hardware could support. Large data systems,
such as those used in airline reservation systems or those used to process government
census data, were left to the worlds of the mainframe and the supercomputer.
Enterprise vendors who dealt with enormous amounts of data developed
relational
database management systems
(RDBMSs), such as those provided by Microsoft
SQL Server or Oracle. With the rise of the Internet came a need for affordable and
accessible database backends for Web applications. This need resulted in another wave
of data accessibility and the popularity of powerful open-source relational databases,
such as PostgreSQL and MySQL. WordPress, the most popular software for Web site
content management, is written in PHP and uses a MySQL database by default. In
2011, WordPress claimed that 22% of all new Web sites are built using WordPress.
2
RDBMSs are based on a tried-and-true design in which each record of data is ide-
ally stored only once in a single place. This system works amazingly well as long as
data always looks the same and stays within a dictated size limit.
Thanks to the constantly dropping price of commodity hardware, it's possible to build
larger and beefier computers to analyze data and provide the database backend for Web
applications. However, as we've just seen, there is a limit to the amount of processing
power that can be built into a single machine before reaching thresholds of considerable
cost. More importantly, a single-machine paradigm provides other limitations that start
to appear when data volume increases, such as cases in which there is a need for high
availability and performance under heavy load or in which timely analysis is required.
By the late 1990s, Internet startups were starting to build some of the amazing,
unprecedented Web applications that are easily taken for granted today: software that
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