MICRO Relational Database Management System
Micro was one of the earliest relational database management systems.[1] It combined the relational model later made famous by Edgar F. Codd and Michael Stonebraker of the University of Michigan's Database Research Group[2] with a natural language interface which allowed non-programmers to use the system.[3]
Micro permitted users with little programming experience to define, enter, interrogate, manipulate and update collections of data in a relatively unstructured and unconstrained environment. An interactive system, Micro was powerful in terms of the complexity of requests which could be made by users without prior programming language experience.[4] Micro includes basic statistical computations such as mean, variance, frequency, median, etc. If more rigorous statistical analysis were desired, the data from a Micro database could be used with Michigan Interactive Data Analysis System (MIDAS), a statistical analysis package available under the Michigan Terminal System (MTS).[5]
Micro was originally implemented in 1968 at the University of Michigan's Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations (ILIR) and ran under the Michigan Terminal System, the time-sharing system developed at U-M. It became the first large scale relational database management system to be used in production. Organizations such as the US Department of Labor, the US Environmental Protection Agency and researchers from University of Alberta, the University of Michigan, and Wayne State University used it to manage very large scale databases. Micro continued to run in production until 1998.
References
- ^ "A set theoretic data structure and retrieval language", William R. Hershey and Carol H. Easthope, Papers from the Session on Data Structures, Spring Joint Computer Conference, May 1972 in ACM SIGIR Forum, Volume 7, Issue 4 (December 1972), pp. 45-55, DOI=10.1145/1095495.1095500, Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA
- ^ "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks", E.F. Codd, Communications of the ACM, volume 13, issue 6 (June 1970), pp.77–387, doi= 10.1145/362384.362685
- ^ MICRO: Information Management System (Version 5.0) Reference Manual, M.A. Kahn, D.L. Rumelhart, and B.L. Bronson, October 1977, Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations (ILIR), University of Michigan
- ^ "Use of a Relational Database to Support Clinical Research: Application in a Diabetes Program", Diane Lomatch, M.P.H., Terry Truax, M.S., Peter Savage, M.D., Diabetes Center Unit, MDRTC, University of Michigan, 1981
- ^ "Converting from Traditional File Structures to Database Management Systems: A Powerful Tool for Nursing Management", Yvonne Marie Abdoo, Ph.D., R.N, Wayne State University College of Nursing, 1987