Explaining three key differentiators versus legacy stacks
The MDS brought a series of technological advancements in comparison with precursor systems (pre-cloud). As demonstrated in Figure 2.1, the main differentiators are its SQL-first approach, cloud-native tools, and managed and modular solutions. In this section, we are going to deep dive into the details of these characteristics.
Lowering technical barriers with a SQL-first approach
Developed in the 1970s by IBM researchers, SQL – or SEQUEL as it was called originally – was designed to access data in an integrated relational database, by both professional programmers and more occasional database users. Here is a link to the full version of the paper, published by Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce (1976): https://doi.org/10.1145/800296.811515.
Decades later, SQL remains indispensable for this purpose, and its popularity has increased sharply. In the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2022, it was the...
