About
IBM System R is a database system built as a research project at IBM San Jose Research (now IBM Almaden Research Center) in the 1970s.
System R was a seminal project: it was a precursor of (SQL), which has since become the standard relational data query language. It was also the first system to demonstrate that a relational database management system could provide good transaction processing performance.
Design decisions in System R, as well as some fundamental algorithm choices (such as the dynamic programming algorithm used in query optimization), influenced many later relational systems.
System R's first customer was Pratt & Whitney in 1977.