Relational Databases - A Brief History

I get asked a lot by friends and colleagues, what is a database? and without going into too much detail, I like to explain what problems RDBM's were trying to solve. Today we face similar issues with using RDBM's, that have led us to solutions such as NoSQ and Big Data solutions such as Hadoop, Hive, etc.

In this section, you will learn a brief history of databases and why databases came about in the first place to address data storage issues. Today, nearly every company will have their data stored on a database or data-warehouse, be it social media updates, financial transactions, purchase orders, retail store inventory, genomic sequence data, can be stored to a database.

[benzflynn]

0:25 _In 1970 the _*_young_*_ Edgar Codd_ Codd was 47 then, man. Had been through WW2 as a coastal pilot, a maths degree from Oxford and had worked at IBM for over 20 years. No spring chicken he.
But the big question in all this is why databases were *ever* organized in non-relational format. Was it due to some limitation in early computer systems that made it impossible for the first commercial computerised databases - and then all successive database systems meekly followed suit ?