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Ask HN: When Did Indexes and Query Planners Become a Part of a Database?
I wanted to see if anyone here knew how they got integrated in the modern database system and what were the adoption challenges and maturity issues before we all now take then for granted.
- greenyoda 11y agoIndexes are very old; they predate database systems. For example, old IBM mainframe operating systems had indexed sequential files (ISAM)[1] in the 1960s. Early databases - the ones based on hierarchical and network data models that preceded relational databases - all had indexes. Query optimization dates all the way back to IBM's System R, a research database that was the first implementation of SQL.[2] The third reference in the Wikipedia article[3] is the paper on query optimization published by the IBM team in 1979. Query optimization was needed to make the performance of relational databases competitive with the older databases that existed at the time, since complex queries across joined tables could be very inefficient if implemented naively (the largest mainframes in those days only had a few megabytes of memory). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISAM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISAM [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_R https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_R [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_optimization#References https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_optimization#References
- ksherlock 11y agoSome of us have been using indexes since 1896 or so. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge-notched_card http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge-notched_card