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Many hundreds of programming systems have been developed in recent years to aid programmers in the management of large amounts of data. Some trends in the development of these data management systems are followed in this paper and combined with ideas now being studied to predict the architecture of the next generation of data management systems. The evol ution of data management facilities can be grouped into several generations with fuzzy boundaries. Generation zero was the era when each programmer wrote all his own input, output, and data manipulation facilities. A new generation of facilities occurred with the use of standard access methods and standard input/ output conversion routines for all programs at an installation or on a particular computer system. The second generation of data management was the development of file manipulation and report writing systems such as RPG, EASYTRIEVE, and MARK IV. Much more comprehensive facilities for the creation, updating, and accessing of large structures of files are included in the third generation of generalized data management systems such as IMS/2, IDS, and the CODASYL specifications. Each of these generations of data management systems marked great increases in system flexibility, generality, modularity, and usability. Before speculating on the future of data management, let us survey this history in more detail. Standard access methods, such as ISAM, BDAM and SAM which formed the first generation data management facilities were mainly incorporated in programming languages and merely gathered some of the commonly performed data manipulation facilities into standard packages for more convenient use, The main benefit of these standard facilities was to relieve each application programmer of the burden of recoding common tasks. This standardization also reduced program dependency on actual stored data structures and formats. Although these access methods and input/ output conversion routines were often convenient to use, they could only accommodate a limited number of different data structures and data types. As computer systems became more common, more widely used, more highly depended on, and eventually more essential to the functioning of many businesses, a