[Discuss] Top Ten Dying IT Skills

[Deryk Barker]

Darren Duncan wrote:
> At 3:28 PM -0700 6/20/07, Alan W. Irwin wrote:
>> I thought the remark about hierarchical databases now being dead was
>> interesting in the sense I never knew they were ever a serious 
>> contender for
>> being "the" database of choice. That said, there are currently 
>> specialized
>> uses for hierarchical databases, and I don't think such use will ever go
>> away.  For example, I understand hierarchical databases are just the 
>> ticket
>> for Plone/Zope, and aren't there other specialize uses such as some 
>> of the
>> more sophisticated Linux file systems?
>
> Hierarchical and Network were the defacto standard way of doing 
> databases back in the 1960s, and Codd introduced the Relational model 
> of data to address their deficiencies.  
Although Codd's work was published in the 1970s, it wasn't until the 
1980s that relational DBMS's became available.

The first such was MRDS, the Multics Relational Data Store, which I 
first encountered c1981, although the limited number of Multics sites 
make those of us who recall it fairly rare.

There was also a portable RDS around in the mid-1980s called Rapport 
which, IIRC, was written in - wait for it - FORTRAN.

Although a hierarchical file system is certainly, in a sense, a 
hierarchical database - and as soon as you introduced links, hard or 
soft, it becomes a network - they are not really DBMS's in the 
traditional sense. Although I guess you could make a case, as journalled 
file systems have the concept of transactions, for instance.