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Computing Atlas

Database History Is a Family Tree

09/20/2026 12:00:00 AM

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Most database entries in this atlas are written as if each product were its own invention, with its own year and its own reason for existing. Read six of them side by side, though, and the atlas's own descriptions already say something plainer: these six did not start from nothing. Each one is a branch of an earlier project, and the branch point itself is usually the more interesting fact than the product it produced.
Most database entries in this atlas are written as if each product were its own invention, with its own year and its own reason for existing. Read six of them side by side, though, and the atlas's own descriptions already say something plainer: these six did not start from nothing. Each one is a branch of an earlier project, and the branch point itself is usually the more interesting fact than the product it produced.

Six lines of descent

MariaDB exists because of a corporate acquisition, not a technical decision: its own record states it was forked from MySQL in 2009 by MySQL's original developers, immediately after Oracle Corporation acquired Sun Microsystems, specifically to keep the software free and open source under the GNU General Public License. Firebird has a similar shape from an earlier decade: it originated from Borland's InterBase codebase in 2000, though the atlas record is also careful to note that later Firebird versions substantially rewrote that inherited code, so the fork became its own project over time rather than staying a copy. LevelDB and RocksDB show the same lineage one generation further along. LevelDB was written by Google fellows Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat and was itself inspired by Google's Bigtable; RocksDB is then a direct fork of LevelDB, built to exploit multi-core processors and fast solid-state storage that LevelDB's own original design did not target. TiDB and VoltDB show a looser but still real form of descent, inheritance by published research rather than by shared code. TiDB, built to be MySQL compatible, drew its initial design inspiration from Google's Spanner and F1 papers rather than forking either system directly. VoltDB, designed by Michael Stonebraker, Sam Madden and Daniel Abadi, grew out of an experimental academic system called H-Store that the same team had built while working across a set of American universities, which then became the basis for the commercial product.

Six lines of descent

MariaDB exists because of a corporate acquisition, not a technical decision: its own record states it was forked from MySQL in 2009 by MySQL's original developers, immediately after Oracle Corporation acquired Sun Microsystems, specifically to keep the software free and open source under the GNU General Public License. Firebird has a similar shape from an earlier decade: it originated from Borland's InterBase codebase in 2000, though the atlas record is also careful to note that later Firebird versions substantially rewrote that inherited code, so the fork became its own project over time rather than staying a copy. LevelDB and RocksDB show the same lineage one generation further along. LevelDB was written by Google fellows Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat and was itself inspired by Google's Bigtable; RocksDB is then a direct fork of LevelDB, built to exploit multi-core processors and fast solid-state storage that LevelDB's own original design did not target. TiDB and VoltDB show a looser but still real form of descent, inheritance by published research rather than by shared code. TiDB, built to be MySQL compatible, drew its initial design inspiration from Google's Spanner and F1 papers rather than forking either system directly. VoltDB, designed by Michael Stonebraker, Sam Madden and Daniel Abadi, grew out of an experimental academic system called H-Store that the same team had built while working across a set of American universities, which then became the basis for the commercial product.
None of this makes the six systems the same product wearing different names; MariaDB, Firebird, RocksDB, TiDB and VoltDB have each gone on to solve different problems in different ways since the point where they branched. But it does mean a reader who wants to understand why any one of them exists is usually better served by asking what it left, rather than what it added.
None of this makes the six systems the same product wearing different names; MariaDB, Firebird, RocksDB, TiDB and VoltDB have each gone on to solve different problems in different ways since the point where they branched. But it does mean a reader who wants to understand why any one of them exists is usually better served by asking what it left, rather than what it added.

Where To Read More

  • MariaDBDatabase Management System
  • FirebirdDatabase Management System
  • LevelDBDatabase Management System
  • RocksDBDatabase Management System
  • TiDBDatabase Management System
  • VoltDBDatabase Management System