Business

A business, also known as an enterprise, agency or a firm, is an entity involved in the provision of goods and/or services to consumers. Businesses are prevalent in capitalist economies, where most of them are privately owned and provide goods and services to customers in exchange for other goods, services, or money. Businesses may also be social not-for-profit enterprises or state-owned public enterprises targeted for specific social and economic objectives. A business owned by multiple individuals may be formed as an incorporated company or jointly organised as a partnership. Countries have different laws that may ascribe different rights to the various business entities.

Business can refer to a particular organization or to an entire market sector, e.g. "the music business". Compound forms such as agribusiness represent subsets of the word's broader meaning, which encompasses all activity by suppliers of goods and services. The goal is for sales to be more than expenditures resulting in a profit.

IBM Business System 12

Business System 12, or simply BS12, was one of the first fully relational database management systems, designed and implemented by IBM's Bureau Service subsidiary at the company's international development centre in Uithoorn, Netherlands. Programming started in 1978 and the first version was delivered in 1982. It was never widely used and essentially disappeared soon after the division was shut down in 1985, possibly because IBM and other companies settled on SQL as the standard.

BS12's lasting contribution to history was the use of a new query language based on ISBL, created at IBM's UK Scientific Centre. Developers of the famous System R underway in the US at the same time were also consulted on certain matters concerning the engine, but the BS12 team rejected SQL unequivocally, being convinced that this apparently unsound and difficult-to-use language (which at that time was also relationally incomplete) would never catch on.

BS12 included a number of interesting features that have yet to appear on most SQL-based systems, some a consequence of following the ISBL precedent, others due to deliberate design. For instance, a view could be parameterised and parameters could be of type TABLE. Thus, a view could in effect be a new relational operator defined in terms of the existing operators. Codd's DIVIDE operator was in fact implemented that way.