During the 1980s, research activity focused on distributed database systems and database machines, but these developments have had little general impact. Another important theoretical idea was the functional data model, but apart from some specialized applications in genetics, molecular biology and fraud investigation, the world took little notice.

In the 1990s, attention shifted to object-oriented databases. These had success in fields that needed to handle more complex data than relational systems could easily cope with, such as spatial, engineering and multimedia data.

Today, the fashionable area for innovation is the XML database. XML databases aim to remove the traditional divide between documents and data, allowing all of an organization's information resources to be held in one place, whether they are highly structured or not.