
A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks by E.F. Codd (1970) [pdf] - maverick_iceman
https://www.seas.upenn.edu/~zives/03f/cis550/codd.pdf
======
snaky
The first, unpublished, most underrated and brilliant paper by Codd,
"Derivability, Redundancy, and Consistency of Relations Stored in Large Data
Banks" \-
[http://www.liberidu.com/blog/images/rj599.pdf](http://www.liberidu.com/blog/images/rj599.pdf)

> The true importance of relational theory is highlighted by the title of the
> original (and considerably shorter) version of Codd’s first paper. That
> version predated the published version by a year, and the title was
> “Derivability, Redundancy, and Consistency of Relations Stored in Large Data
> Banks.” The title of this unpublished version emphasizes that the real
> importance of relational theory is that it provides a rigorous method of
> asserting arbitrarily complex consistency constraints that must be satisfied
> by the data within the database. Strange as it may sound, Oracle Database
> did not enforce referential integrity constraints until Version 7 was
> released in the 1990s (by which time Oracle Corporation was already the
> world’s largest database company)

[https://iggyfernandez.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/whats-so-
sacr...](https://iggyfernandez.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/whats-so-sacred-about-
relational-anyway/3/)

~~~
nigwil_
EF Codd updated his ideas too:

Extending the Data Base Relational Model to Capture More Meaning by E.F. Codd
IBM Research Laboratory published in Volume 1 Number 1 (March 1979) issue of
AUSTRALIAN COMPUTER SCIENCE COMMUNICATIONS, which incorporated papers from the
2nd Australian Computer Science Conference 1-2 February 1979 in Hobart,
Tasmania.

[http://www.retrocomputingtasmania.com/home/projects/history/...](http://www.retrocomputingtasmania.com/home/projects/history/rm-
t-paper)

------
eru
Oddly enough, to this day most programming languages encourage a graph or
hierarchical model.

Taking Codd serious suggests using relations inside programs as well.

See eg
[http://shaffner.us/cs/papers/tarpit.pdf](http://shaffner.us/cs/papers/tarpit.pdf)

~~~
fsloth
If the schema is fixed relations are pretty nice for various data transforms.
One can implement tables in C++ with vectors, struct for row and a typed
integer for references for entities. Beats object model hands down any time
when complexity is only a tad above trivial.

~~~
eru
Yes, indeed. Though I'd rather have better support from the programming
language than what C++ can provide.

