Rebirth of the Tech Madman

At this stage, the company's annual sales have exceeded 10 million US dollars. This level is about the same as the top-ranked successful software company in the personal computer industry.

But don't forget that the database is mainly served by large customers, whose profits far exceed those on the personal computer platform.

Undoubtedly, it was established two years earlier than Tang Huan's philosopher and fully qualified to be named a "successful enterprise".

However, in the first few years, like other startups, walking on thin ice. This can be seen from the two changes in its company name.

In addition to relying on the extraordinary ability of the founder, the rise of.

Human needs for data collection, storage, and analysis have existed since ancient times. The most famous example is the U.S. Census, but the tools used until 195 were punch cards and card tabulation machines.

With the rise and maturity of computer application technology, data processing has finally entered a new stage of development, and database management systems have emerged at the historic moment, forming a huge market with immeasurable commercial value.

To calculate the data, m.≌★om computer processing must be abstracted through mathematical means, so as to summarize different structural models.

For example, a mesh database, as the name suggests, the associations between data are crisscrossed as in reality.

The earliest commercialized product of mesh database was ids running on mainframe platform launched by General Electric Company in 1964. Other well-known implementations include HP's image and idms.

Among them, the highest commercial achievement is idms, which has brought in annual sales of more than 100 million U.S. dollars for the company in the past two years.

Another example is a layered database, where the association between data is further abstracted into a model similar to a genealogy.

The most famous commercialized product of layered database. It is the ims launched by ibm in the late 1960s.

Whether it is a mesh database. Still a layered database. As the scale of the database expands, the connection between the data will be so complicated that even the administrator who created the database at the beginning will be confused, which brings great difficulties to maintenance.

Fortunately, at this time, the theory of relational databases emerged.

In 1970, ibm researcher Edgar Frank Cod published a paper entitled "a;;;largeshareddatabanks"-"Relational Model of Large Shared Databases", which laid the theoretical foundation of the relational model and obtained It has been appreciated by the academic and industrial circles.

For this reason, Edgar Frank Cod is known as the "father of relational databases." And in 1981 won the Turing Award.

When the academic debate about which is better between the mesh database and the relational database, the latter won and ended, and the relational database changed from a theoretical achievement to a software realization topic, and it was immediately before the researchers.

—— Honeywell first made the commercial results of relational database. It launched mdrs in 1976, but the market performance was mediocre.

As the first company to propose a relational model, ibm certainly will not lag behind. It has specially formed a 40-person team to develop a relational database and named it the "r" system. That is, the meaning comes from the first letter of the English word "relationship".

In 1974, the ibm R&D team won the first battle. Successfully developed a structured query language for relational databases, namely sql.

By 1977, the "r" system could be put into operation.

But ibm, which has a serious bureaucracy, is guilty of old problems. Its hierarchical database ims was selling hot at that time, which brought a lot of money to the company, so it naturally suppressed the commercial operation of the "r" system.

Ever since, the outside world only saw the "r" system developers frequently publishing academic papers, but did not see ibm actively launching market activities.

In this way, ibm gave the other two relational databases-ingres and, the opportunity to stand out.

ingres was jointly developed by a group of professors from the University of California at Berkeley who received government funding. In order to develop Zheru's own database ebase, Tang Huan poached some people from them.

The R&D team of ingres and the "r" R&D team of ibm are familiar with each other, so they often carry out technical exchanges and have developed a set of relational database language quel similar to sql.

The two groups also guilty of literati reciprocity, quarrels broke out from time to time, and then accused each other of plagiarizing their own solutions.

In the end, the two sides simply parted ways and competed with each other.

In 1980, several people in the ingres R&D team established the Relational Technology Co., Ltd. to carry out the commercial operation of the ingres database.

The predecessor of SDL, the software development laboratory-sdl, was originally created to facilitate foreign exchange.

At that time, the company where Larry Ellison worked had to develop a data storage and retrieval device, which was a very heavy workload.

As a result, Larry Ellison successfully outsourced the company and co-founded SDL with his former colleagues Bob Miner and Ed Oates. He took over this job and made the three people earn a lot of money. pen.

After that, Larry Ellison left the company to concentrate on operating his own SDL.

He also moved his office to the heart of Silicon Valley and changed its name to a connected software company to reflect positively the relational database that the company is developing.

Unlike ingres, which has its own relational database language quel, ibm's sql is used for reference, and Tang Huan's ebase also has a similar choice.

As a pioneer in the commercialization of relational databases. The database naturally gained some first-mover advantages.

such as. The CIA came to the door on its own initiative. I want to buy this product. At the same time, Larry Ellison also found another major client-Naval Intelligence Agency.

The first version of the platform was pdp-11, while the versions required by the Central Intelligence Agency and Naval Intelligence Agency were ibm mainframe and va.

Both of these products are not cheap, and the financial resources are not enough to buy, but transplantation is inseparable from this environment. Larry Ellison and others can only ask grandpa and grandma to borrow them, and even use rogue methods. Finally completed the second version.

However, there are still many problems, such as incorrect retrieval results, and even data loss.

At this time, Larry Ellison's personal abilities became apparent. He just delivered this immature product to the Central Intelligence Agency and the Naval Intelligence Agency, making the other party his own troubleshooter.

Of course, the service attitude is definitely good enough.

Relying on this ingenious marketing and good service, the market for relational databases was opened. And proceeded to commercialize ingres. The special feature is excellent technology and excellent quality.

In this way, and launched an incompatible competition.

Compared to those professors. Larry Ellison's methods are obviously more sophisticated.

Due to the closeness of the name and, from time to time, the check will be sent by mistake. At this time, Larry Ellison will try to drag the check and not return it, so as to increase the unnecessary financial pressure on the opponent and make the complaints continue.

In this competition, taking the lead, Larry Ellison also began to have spare time to replace assembly language with C language, re-written the third version of the database, and changed the company's name.

And the competition represents the relational database market pattern in the field of model computers and mainframes. Under Tang Huan's promotion, the microcomputer database market has gradually taken shape, showing coveted commercial value.

For example, as a leader, ebase, with the electronic, powerful, and easy-to-use features advertised by "e", contributed 50 million US dollars in sales to Zheru in 1981 alone.

Ashton-Tate's dbase, backed by the ibm-platform, seems to be in great competition with Zheru's ebase, but it does not currently have the characteristics of a relational database and is not qualified to be an ebase opponent.

Seeing the boom in the relational database market, ibm was dumbfounded and hurriedly caught up. After rigorously testing the "r" system, it launched its own commercial relational database sql/ds at the end of 1981.

The Blue Giant does have a conservative style and the capital of late development. In 198, it launched a more comprehensive industrial-grade database db. Large customers approved of buying it, but it also brought back a lot of previous disadvantages.

Ebase, db, and db all support sql, which virtually makes this database language a de facto industry standard, and sooner or later other relational database products will come closer.

But the current relational database vendors do not realize this. Except ebase and db, other databases are trying their best to increase the types of computer platforms they can support.

For example, starting from the fourth version, Fangyuan Computer and ibm- are officially supported, and the portability, connectivity, and compatibility of its own products are widely promoted.

Portability refers to the support of many computer hardware platforms, while connectivity refers to the databases installed on different computers that can be connected for data communication.

As for compatibility, it refers to compatibility with db and ebase that also use sql. This propaganda gimmick is inevitably suspected of holding thighs and being exposed.

When Tang Huanliu arrived in front of the booth, he happened to see Larry Ellison skillfully introducing the various benefits of the database.

"This Larry Ellison is very similar to Steve Jobs. He is full of diversity, but it's really getting more and more lively." Tang Huan asked casually after joking, "Right, it's the first time to show up, right? ?"

"My impression is like this." Charles Simeone turned his head.

"Originally focused on pursuing big customers, now it's starting to focus on publicity to the public. It seems that the market positioning has changed." Tang Huan thoughtfully analyzed.

"It wasn't until the third version that they began to support the transaction feature. From this, it is not difficult to infer that their technological research and development is very limited in advanced." Looking at Larry Ellison boasting about it, it was a pleasure. As he performed, Charles Simeone was quite disdainful.

The so-called transaction is the basic unit of recovery and concurrency control. To put it bluntly, the operations that are classified as a group are either all completed or all cancelled.

For example, the operation of transferring money from account a to account b includes at least two steps, that is, subtract a number from account a, and then add a number to account b.

This operation must all be completed. If a catastrophic failure such as unexpected power failure, system downtime, software crash, etc. occurs between the first and second steps, it is also necessary to ensure that all invalid operations can be undone. Otherwise, the database will be in trouble.

After ebase was launched, it has been supporting transaction features since 1980, at least one and a half years ahead of it.

It is based on these factors that Charles Simeone is proud, and some can't understand Larry Ellison's exaggerated show.

At this time, Larry Ellison got up and waved his hand. Several employees took out a large advertising board from the back and stood it in front of the stage, causing a commotion.

Tang Huan took a look and saw that in the middle was a representative jet fighter, and on the left was a parrot representing Ashton-Tater Company~www.wuxiaspot.com~ on the right was the phoenix representing philosophers. The logo was originally made up of the two numbers "" and "one" in the free _you bird pattern. Later, due to the overwhelming sense of honor and catering to Tang Huan's preferences, the subordinates gradually evolved it into the oriental bird -Phoenix.

The jet fighter opened its bow from left to right and launched several missiles to attack the Parrot and Phoenix. Each missile meant that the database surpassed the function of dbase and ebase.

"So arrogant!" Charles Simeone's face was blue with anger, while Tang Huan looked at the triumphant Larry Ellison playfully. The other party seemed to enjoy the sensational effect he had created.

The scene was noisy, and I didn't know where to throw a few bottles of Coke, and they smashed them heavily on the advertising board. It was a sudden crash.

Seeing this scene, the crowd became more and more noisy, causing the exhibition security to assemble nervously to maintain order.

Larry Ellison wiped the splashed drink on his face and yelled furiously, "Who did it? Have the ability to stand up!"

Tang Huan and Charles Simeone looked at each other. It's really exciting to see who is so happy and enmity! (To be continued.)