Hierarchical Model Leads To the Evolution of Relational Model

A hierarchical database model is a data model in which the data is organized into a tree-like structure. The structure allows representing information using parent/child relationships: each parent can have many children, but each child has only one parent (also known as a 1-to-many relationship). Redundancy would occur because hierarchical databases handle one-to-many relationships well but do not handle many-to-many relationships well. Faced with these serious problems, the computer brains of the world got together and came up with the network model. Network Database looks like a hierarchical Database in that you can see it as a type of tree. However, in the case of a Network Database, the look is more like several trees which share branches. Thus, children can have multiple parents and parents can have multiple children. Nevertheless, though it was a dramatic improvement, the network model was far from perfect. Most profoundly, the model was difficult to implement and maintain. Most implementations of the network model were used by computer programmers rather than real users. What was needed was a simple model which could be used by real end users to solve real problems and this lead to the evolution of Relational Model.