DATATRIEVE is a database query and report writer tool originally from

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president unt ...

. It runs on the

OpenVMS OpenVMS, often referred to as just VMS, is a multi-user, multiprocessing and virtual memory-based operating system. It is designed to support time-sharing, batch processing, transaction processing and workstation applications. Customers using Ope ...

operating system, as well as several

PDP-11 The PDP-11 is a series of 16-bit minicomputers sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from 1970 into the 1990s, one of a set of products in the Programmed Data Processor (PDP) series. In total, around 600,000 PDP-11s of all models were sold, ...

operating systems. DATATRIEVE's command structure is nearly plain English, and it is an early example of a Fourth Generation Language (4GL).

Overview

DATATRIEVE works against flat files, indexed files, and databases. Such data files are delimited using record definitions stored in the Common Data Dictionary (CDD), or in RMS files. DATATRIEVE is used at many

installations.

History

DATATRIEVE was developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s by a team of software engineers at DEC's Central Commercial Engineering facilities in Merrimack and Nashua, New Hampshire, under database architect

Jim Starkey Jim Starkey (born January 6, 1949 in Illinois) is a database architect responsible for developing InterBase, the first relational database to support multi-versioning,Babcock, Charles"MySQL Database to Get Replication Monitoring, Multiversioning ...

. Many of the project's engineers went on to highly visible careers in database management and other software disciplines. Version 1 for the PDP-11 was released in 1977; VAX DATATRIEVE was released in 1981 as part of the VAX Information Architecture. DATATRIEVE adopted the

wombat Wombats are short-legged, muscular quadrupedal marsupials that are native to Australia. They are about in length with small, stubby tails and weigh between . All three of the extant species are members of the family Vombatidae. They are adap ...

as its notional mascot; the program's help file responded to “HELP WOMBAT” with factual information about real world wombats.

Examples of DATATRIEVE usage

DATATRIEVE queries and commands approach plain English sentence structure, though would not be considered natural language, since a precise sentence structure must be used: DTR> FOR FAMILIES WITH NUMBER_KIDS = 2 CON> PRINT KID_NAME, AGE OF KIDS WITH AGE GT 20 DATATRIEVE can also be used to modify data: DTR> FOR FAMILIES MODIFY EACH_KID OF FIRST 1 KIDS Enter KID_NAME: DATATRIEVE can also cross multiple datasets, creating joined data views: DTR> PRINT NAME, TYPE, PRICE OF CON> YACHTS CROSS OWNERS OVER TYPE

References

External links

* * * {{cite web , title=Datatrieve and Wombats , author=Martin P.J. Zinser , publisher=IBPhoenix , url=http://www.ibphoenix.com/resources/documents/history/doc_295 , accessdate=2013-09-02 Proprietary database management systems OpenVMS software