DB2

Foreword

In the years since E.F. Codd’s groundbreaking work in the 1970s, relational database systems have become ubiquitous in the business world. Today, most of the world’s business data is stored in the rows and columns of relational databases. The relational model is ideally suited to applications in which data has a relatively simple and uniform structure, and in which database structure evolves much more slowly than data values.

With the advent of the Web, however, big changes began to occur in the database world, driven by globalization and by dramatic reductions in the cost of storing, transmitting, and processing data. Today, businesses are globally interconnected and exchange large volumes of data with customers, suppliers, and ...