Fifty years of the data stack: interactive history traces monoliths to lakehouses, 1976–2026
craigmullins · x · 2026-10-13
Columnar's Ian Cook published "Data: The First 50 Years," an interactive history of the analytic data stack from 1976 to 2026 across three layers — access, compute, storage — with estimated workload share per technology per year. It traces flat files and hierarchical DBs giving way to Codd's relational model and SQL, ODBC/JDBC standardization in the 1990s, Hadoop and S3-style object stores driving compute/storage separation, managed cloud warehouses, and today's lakehouse and managed open tables (S3 Tables, Snowflake, Databricks).
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