Introduction - Database Processing: Fundamentals, Design, and Implementation - page 25

Over time, capabilities emerged to overcome this problem. Web application devel-
opers learned to add SQL statements to their Web applications, and soon thousands of
databases were being processed over the Web. You will learn more about such process-
ing in Chapter 11. An interesting phenomenon was the emergence of open source DBMS
products. Open source products generally make the source code widely available so that
a group of programmers not bound to a single company can contribute to the program.
Further, some forms of these products are usually offered as free downloads, although
other forms or product support must be purchased from the company that owns the
product.
A good example of this is the MySQL DBMS ( www.mysql.com ) . MySQL was originally
released in 1995 by the Swedish company MySQL AB. In February 2008, Sun Microsystems
bought MySQL AB, and in January 2010, Oracle Corporation completed its acquisition of Sun
Microsystems. This means that Oracle Corporation now owns two major DBMS products:
Oracle Database and Oracle MySQL. At present, MySQL continues to be available as an open
source product, and the free MySQL Community Server edition can be downloaded from the
MySQL Web site. MySQL has proven to be especially popular with Web site developers who
need to run Web page queries against an SQL DBMS on a Web server running the Linux oper-
ating system. We will work with MySQL in Chapter 10C.
MySQL is not the only open source DBMS product—in fact, as this is being written, there
are 83 “free database management systems” listed on the Wikipedia category page http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Free_database_management_systems (up from the 72 listed
when the previous edition of this topic went to press).
One interesting outcome of the emergence of open source DBMS products is that companies
that typically sell proprietary (closed source) DBMS products now offer free versions of their
products. For example, Microsoft now offers SQL Server 2012 Express ( http://www.microsoft.com/
en-us/sqlserver/editions/2012-editions/express.aspx ) , and Oracle Corporation makes its Oracle
Database 11 g Express Edition available for free ( http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/products/
express-edition/overview/index.html ) . Although neither of these products is as complete or as
powerful ( for example, in terms of maximum data storage allowed) as some other versions the
companies sell, they are useful for projects that require a small database. They are also ideal for
students learning to use databases and SQL.
In the late 1990s, XML was defined to overcome the problems that occur when HTML
is used to exchange business documents. The design of the XML family of standards not
only solved the problems of HTML, it also meant that XML documents were superior for
exchanging views of database data. In 2002, Bill Gates said that “XML is the lingua-franca of
the Internet Age.”
XML database processing was given a further boost with the definition of XML Web ser-
vice standards such as SOAP (not an acronym), WSDL (Web Services Description Language),
UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration), and others. Using Web services, it
is possible to expose nuggets of database processing to other programs that use the Internet
infrastructure. This means, for example, that in a supply chain management application, a
vendor can expose portions of its inventory application to its suppliers. Further, it can do so in
a standardized way.
The last row in Figure 1-25 brings up to the present. Following the development of XML, the
NoSQL (“Not only SQL”) movement and Big Data have emerged in recent years, particularly
following a 2009 conference organized around work on open source distributed databases (dis-
cussed in Chapter 12). The NoSQL movement should really be called a NoRelational movement
because the work is really on databases that do not follow the relational model introduced in this
chapter and discussed in Chapter 3. The Big Data movement is based on the need for informa-
tion systems to handle increasingly large sets of data and, together with NoSQL (non-relational)
databases, is the basis for such applications as Facebook and Twitter. We will discuss the NoSQL
movement and Big Data, together with the associated topics of distributed databases, virtual-
ization and cloud computing , in Chapter 12.
The NoSQL movement and Big Data bring us to the edge of the IT volcano, where the
magma of new technology is just now oozing from the ground. What happens next will be, in
part, up to you.