Embedded Database Systems in the Age of IoT

摘要

Embedded database systems have been around since the late 70s. Industry veterans, like myself, remember Btrieve, C-tree, Empress, db_VISTA and dBASE. Back in the day, embedded databases were used for departmental computing line-of-business applications, mostly on PCs and small Unix systems. These systems were siloes-they didn't, and didn't need to, share their data. To the extent that data was shared, it was in the form of a report the system generated. For example, at one database system vendor I worked for, we developed a system to track nuclear missile motors' (rocket engines) movement, which was used for compliance with the START treaty. It was a PC-based system that, if a Soviet inspector ever asked, could generate a report about any specific motor-where it is, where it had been, whether it had been expended in a test and so on.