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Database research has been an active and diverse area, with many specializations, carried out since the early days of dealing with the database concept in the 1960s.

It has strong ties with database technology and DBMS products.

Database research has taken place at research and development groups of companies ( e. g., notably at IBM Research, who contributed technologies and ideas virtually to any DBMS existing today ), research institutes, and academia.

Research has been done both through theory and prototypes.

The interaction between research and database related product development has been very productive to the database area, and many related key concepts and technologies emerged from it.

Notable are the Relational and the Entity-relationship models, the atomic transaction concept and related Concurrency control techniques, Query languages and Query optimization methods, RAID, and more.

Research has provided deep insight to virtually all aspects of databases, though not always has been pragmatic, effective ( and cannot and should not always be: research is exploratory in nature, and not always leads to accepted or useful ideas ).

Ultimately market forces and real needs determine the selection of problem solutions and related technologies, also among those proposed by research.

However, occasionally, not the best and most elegant solution wins ( e. g., SQL ).

Along their history DBMSs and respective databases, to a great extent, have been the outcome of such research, while real product requirements and challenges triggered database research directions and sub-areas.