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I'm a young upstart programmer and I've never actually seen a database. But computers in large part come in boxes, not in cylinders so I was wondering why they are always represented as a cylinder when people show their architecture drawings. Is there a reason why or is it just tradition to draw them like that? |
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Although I don't have a specific reference to cite, I took it to represent a hard drive. Historically, hard drives store data magnetically on round cylinders. Since databases are all about persistance, hard drives are the mechanism for doing so. |
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The icon is probably meant to represent an old-school disk pack like this
mainly because databases typically reside on a large random-access device like an HDD. |
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Because their main purpose is to write data to a cylinder (disk). |
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I've always looked at the icon more as a silo than a cylinder: that is, a large high-volume container that can store loads of grain/salt/data. |
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