I’m curious about the origin of the term “database”? Of course the “data” part I understand because a database way to store data. But why do we use the word “base”. If that’s a general term to refer to a collection then I’ve never heard it before. Can anybody explain where the “base” in database comes from?
Base is the foundation. A database isn’t the data; that’s data (well, in common use, “I have a database of information” – but it’s not strictly correct).
It’s base in the sence of ‘central coordinating place of scattered activities’ like Base of Operations ,or even Army Base
All the data is stored in the ‘base’, and any operations on the data must retreive it from there, and replace updates to there.
I develop the damn things for a living and I’m not sure myself! But my best guess is that there was always a sense that “on a base level” you have the raw data arrayed in a storage structure, and then you have ways of displaying it or interacting with it, which are structurally separate considerations, i.e., in some important sense the data is not literally embedded in the display and interface.
By contrast to that, consider a spreadsheet application such as Excel. You can’t really display cell A1 anywhere other than where it is. (You can define some other cell as being equal to cell A1, but that’s not quite the same thing). This was even more true years ago (Excel has gotten fancier over the years). The screen you see is not a different thing from the structure in which the data is stored.
In a database, even the very simple flat-file ones such as you’d find in Microsoft Works or AppleWorks, you define fields in a screen where fields are defined, and then you design the screens in which data is displayed as a totally separate endeavor.
Did I mention that this is just a WAG? It could be that John S. Base wrote a formative description of data management long before Edgar Codd came around.
This page quotes the OED’s entry for “database”, but it’s not very illuminating:
My reading is that a database is a base of data from which you can answer a diverse set of questions, as opposed to a source of data that only answers a limited set of questions (or even only one question). The word “base” doesn’t seem to have any special meaning in this context. It’s just something someone made up in 1962.
the database is the structure into which the data is poured.
Well, in software at least, a database is often the “foundation” of a software application, so in that sense the term seems appropriate, although I’m not sure how much that explanation really has to do with the origin of the term.
Great analogy.
And I really miss the old sugar-free raspberry R:Base. The new stuff just isn’t the same.