This is a rather personal view of the history before Caché.
It is in no sense meant to compete with the excellent books from Mike Kadow discussed in an earlier article.
We have different histories and so this is meant to create a different perspective of the past.

DC is still a hidden jewel for customers:

It's a general problem that feedback from users is often quite poor.

In a previous exercise, I was able to show the power of Caché.
A medium-designed set of interdependent tables with some GB of data.
URLs cross reference over some million pages resulting in ~3 billion records

Competition was between

• Caché
• PostgreSQL
• MySQL

Criteria were Speed + Storage consumption
I composed a customized loader fed over a "raw" TCP connection
Mapping the "objects" into the final table by directly writing to Global Storage.,