Relational Database Management Systems: The Business Explosion [Guest editor's introduction]

This special issue (part 2 of a series began with the special issue in October-December 2012) tells the history of how IBM and several new, independent software companies built companies that supplanted the database management system companies and their DBMS models in both query-oriented usage and in many transaction-processing applications. The story of this transformation is told in this issue of the Annals, which describes how each of these pioneering relational database management companies developed and marketed their products to meet the relational challenge and how well they succeeded. The result was explosive business growth and creation of five companies with more than $1 billion in sales. This special issue focuses on the growth of four of the leading RDBMS companies, with recollections by the pioneers about the history of the companies that they worked for: IBM, Oracle, Informix, and Sybase.