Big data applications bring new database choices, challenges

The volumes of data that had to be handled back then seem amusingly modest by today’s “big data” applications standards, with IBM’s 3380 mainframe able to store what seemed like a capacious 2.5 GB of data when it was launched in 1980. To put data into IMS, you needed to understand how to navigate the physical structure of the database itself, and it was a radical step indeed when IBM launched DB2 in 1983. In this new approach, programmers would write in a language called SQL and the database management system itself would figure out the best access path to the data via an “optimiser.”