Future Development
S. M. Deen · 1977
Data base technology is barely 10 years old and is still in the early stage of development, but is has already made a great impact on data processing. A growing number of people are now using data bases and there is no doubt that this trend will continue, most probably with an accelerated pace due to decreasing hardware and increasing software costs. However, data bases are slow in processing and consequently costly in operation. The breakthrough here is likely to come from the current researches in storage technology, particularly in associative memory. In fact the widespread use of the relational model, with all its powerful facilities, crucially depends on such a breakthrough. But is the relational model capable of meeting all our future data base requirements? To the academic, the answer is a resounding ‘yes’. And yet to researchers in IBM, where tie relational model was conceived and is still being nourished, the answer appears less clear cut. One of their team led by M. E. Senko has already proposed another model called Data Independent Accessing Model (DIAM). This is a serious proposal and certainly deserves careful examination. Future development will also be affected by standardisation in data bases where work has already begun. In this chapter we shall consider these issues, beginning in section 9.1 with an examination of future storage development, followed in section 9.2 with a look at the DIAM model. The progress in standardisation will be discussed in section 9.3, with a conclusion in section 9.4. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.