*Ah, where to begin?* You see those monstrous contraptions in the photo up there?
That’s IBM’s Model 305 RAMAC, circa the 1950s, one of the world's first hard disk drives. It stored a whopping 5 megabytes! And not the 5 megabytes you have on your phones now that are all sleek and pocket-sized—no, these were 5 megabytes you could barely squeeze into a cargo plane. Imagine needing a crane just to load your data!
By the 1970s, the world was drowning in data, and COBOL was our so-called "lifesaver." Oh, COBOL! The programming language everyone used to store data that felt like it was written by someone trying to make taxes sound fun. Data records were like those huge punch cards stacked in filing cabinets, sprawling across rooms, and yet, everyone kept thinking it was a great idea to store everything. It was the age of bureaucracy gone berserk. Want to look up a customer record? Great, let's sort through miles of magnetic tape. How efficient!
Now, back to COBOL.
That was the 'language of data' back then, written in a way that almost encouraged you to lose information rather than find it. You’d write reams and reams of code just to sort a simple list of records.
And don’t get me started on the formatting: it was like having your hands tied behind your back, trying to type with your nose, while a bureaucrat tells you you’re doing it all wrong.
COBOL had us logging data that was the equivalent of a toddler's scribbles in crayon on the walls—messy, imprecise, and oh, so infuriating.
So there I was, staring at the chaos of COBOL, data files stacked to the moon, with each file clunkier than the last. The amount of data was exploding—businesses couldn’t get enough of keeping every single transaction ever made, every possible employee record, every tiny morsel of information, and then some. By the early 70s, we were literally drowning. Businesses couldn’t even find their own data in the mess, and don’t even think about asking COBOL to do anything more complex than "get me a list of names." You wanted to actually query your data, like asking, “Who are my top ten customers?” Hah! Good luck. That was like trying to talk to your toaster.
And that, my dear students, is when I had my grand idea. SQL—Structured Query Language. Not just a way to store data, but a way to retrieve it without losing your sanity. I came up with what I call Codd's Twelve Rules—well, they’re more guidelines, but let's not quibble. The goal was to make data management something humans could actually use, not just data hoarders who were fine with a life of sifting through magnetic spaghetti.
**Codd's Laws are like my commandments**, and if you want to build a proper SQL database, you follow them. Let me break it down for you:
1. **Information Rule**: All information is represented in one and only one way – as values in a table. None of this multi-format COBOL nonsense.
2. **Guaranteed Access Rule**: Each item of data is accessible by a combination of table name, primary key value, and column name. Simple! None of that digging around in tape reels.
3. **Systematic Treatment of Nulls**: Null values must be uniformly treated, none of this pretending missing data doesn’t exist, unlike the COBOL days where NULLs were just ghostly specters of lost information.
4. **Dynamic Online Catalog**: All that metadata you need? It’s right there, in the tables themselves, so you don't need a PhD in computer science just to access it.
And on and on the rules go, each one slamming the door shut on another inefficiency of data storage from the COBOL dark ages. The big idea? To actually structure data in a way that made sense! The kind of sense you could explain to someone without seeing their eyes glaze over after five minutes.
So yes, COBOL did a lot for its time, but by the early '70s, it was like a stubborn old uncle who refuses to upgrade his flip phone. It wasn’t just a storage problem anymore; it was a people problem. And SQL? It was the answer the world didn’t even know it was begging for.
So let’s raise a toast to SQL—a language that let us get our heads above the waves of data and finally start swimming forward, instead of doggy-paddling in circles with COBOL. And remember, when you’re building your databases, you’re not just learning a tool; you’re learning how we rose out of the chaos of COBOL’s data swamp and built something better.
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