Background

Data storage, indexing, and retrieval have long been crucial tasks of many large organizations such as governments, banks, hospitals, and libraries. As human societies have grown increasingly complex, data management requirements have also increased. Some of the new challenges include the complexity of what the data represents, how the data is used, as well as in the sheer volume of data. Since the development of modern electronic computers in the later half of the twentieth century, tools such as relational database management systems (RDBMS) and the Structured Query Language (SQL) have become standards that are very widely used for data handling in many different types of organization.

In a typical organization, many different users need to access the data management system, and hence many database applications are server-based. They can be combined with other server-based technologies, often called enterprise technologies, such as web servers, web services, as well as remote computing heterogeneous architectures.

At the current time, there are many different database systems. These range from very large-scale expensive commercial applications that are suitable for high-end uses, to freely available open-source tools running on typical personal computers with operating systems such as Microsoft Windows or Linux.

DatabaseLink is a Mathematica application that provides a set of tools that allow convenient integration of Mathematica with database management systems.