DBDB.io The Encyclopedia of Database Systems · Est. 2017
Database of Databases

Database Entry

System R


IBM System R was an experimental relational database management system developed as an IBM research project. It is regarded as the first implementation of SQL and was designed to evaluate the practicality of relational database concepts and high-performance transaction processing on IBM hardware. Its design introduced many techniques that later became standard in relational database systems.

Country of Origin
US
Start Year
1972
End Year
1979
Project Type
Industrial Research
Written in
Assembly, PL/S
Operating System
MVS
License
Proprietary

Database Entry

System R


IBM System R was an experimental relational database management system developed as an IBM research project. It is regarded as the first implementation of SQL and was designed to evaluate the practicality of relational database concepts and high-performance transaction processing on IBM hardware. Its design introduced many techniques that later became standard in relational database systems.

History[03][04][05]


IBM System R began as a research project at IBM's San Jose Research Laboratory in 1974. An early prototype known as "Phase Zero" was developed during 1974–1975 before the full System R implementation was built. Pratt & Whitney became the first external installation in 1977.

The project directly influenced IBM relational products including SQL/DS and Db2, as well as many non-IBM database systems.

Concurrency Control


Coordination


Data Model


Foreign Keys


Indexes


Isolation Levels


Joins


Logging


Query Execution


Query Interface


SQL

Storage Architecture


Storage Model


Storage Organization


System Architecture


Views


Citations

5 sources
  1. The relational database | IBM ibm.com
  2. IBM System R - Wikipedia wikipedia.org
  3. https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2013/05/102658267-05-01-acc.pdf computerhistory.org
  4. A History and Evaluation of System R for CACM - IBM Research ibm.com
  5. https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~brewer/cs262/SystemR.pdf berkeley.edu
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