Network Databases: Past, Present, and Future

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to review the past, present, and future in terms of three "generations" of network databases.  Particular emphasis is placed upon the Internet and the booming explosion of restricted-access subsets of the Internet known as intranets.  The Internet is a collection of millions upon millions of local, regional, national, and global networks.  It commenced in 1969 with four supercomputers across the U. S. networked to the Pentagon.  Very few people used the Internet for the first 20 years.  Explosive growth took place after 1992 when the Netscape Navigator web browser incorporated HTML protocols to read HTML codes which were invented by particle physicists in Switzerland in 1990.  This was the beginning of the "first generation" of network computing on what became known as the world wide web (WWW) or simply the "web."  The first generation was mainly one way flows of information from web server computers to client user computers on the web.  At this same time, the first generation of database interactive computing was confined to local and wide area networks (LANs and WANs).  Although data files could be transmitted across the Internet using FTP and other protocols, databases could not interact on the WWW or the Internet as a whole.  Most web applications are still in the first HTML generation.  The second generation of networking and databases followed quickly when web servers became able to interact in a more formal way with remote clients on the Internet.  With special types of middleware software, database servers could process data transmitted from remote Internet client computers.  For example, customer orders and market surveys could be processed and server-side databases could be updated without human intervention.  Middleware CGI scripting and later ActiveX and Java software enabled web servers, database servers, and remote clients on the Internet to become more interactive.  The second generation is relatively new and growing in popularity at this time.  The third generation is only just emerging and is best described as distributed network computing.  In the second generation, middleware updates "front ends" of database servers on the server side when clients transmit signals.  In the third generation, databases can be distributed globally and can communicate with each other with "back-end" distributed network computing.  There is virtually no difference between having all databases on one computer with one operator versus having databases on 100 computers with 100 operators residing anywhere in the world.