ABSTRACT
The genesis of big data computing can be traced to the development of databases in the 1960s. For most of computing history, database solutions have been focused on capturing, storing, managing, querying, and analyzing structured data. This chapter presents an overview of the characteristics of the traditional databases and lessons learnt from using, developing, and maintaining them. A database management system (DBMS) is a software product that supports the reliable storage of the database, implements the structures for maintaining relationships and constraints, and offers storage and retrieval services to users. The network database model evolved specifically to handle nonhierarchical relationships. It also raises relationships to the status of named database elements, network sets, and it introduces commands for manipulating them. All the strengths of object-oriented modeling are available in an object-oriented database: inheritance, encapsulation, polymorphism, and message-passing among objects.
