Monday, December 22, 2025
Tuesday, January 14, 2025
Friday, December 27, 2024
Monday, July 22, 2024
Sunday, July 14, 2024
NEW PAPER: UNDERSTANDING THE REAL RDM - E.F. CODD 1969-70 PAPERS PART 2
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Logical Symmetric Access
2. Universal Data Sublanguage
2.1. FOPL vs. SOL
2.2. Relational Completeness
2.3. Computational Completeness and Hosting
3. Kinds of Relations
3.1. Expressible and Named Relations
3.2. Derived Relations
3.3. Data Storage
4. Derived Relations and Redundancy
4.1. Database Consistency
5. Database Catalog
Conclusion
Monday, July 8, 2024
NEW PAPER: UNDERSTANDING THE REAL RDM - E.F.CODD 1969-70 Papers Part 1
Table of Contents
Series Preface
Introduction
1. Interpretation of Database Relations
1.1. Attributes as Constrained Domains
1.2. Time-Varying Relations
2. Representation of Database Relations
2.1. Physical Data Independence
2.1.1. Uniquely Named Attributes
2.1.2. Primary Keys
2.1.3. Relations and R-tables
3. Normalization
3.1. First Normal Form and “Simple” Domains
3.2. Normalization and Non-simple Domains
3.2.1. Foreign Keys
Conclusion
Monday, June 17, 2024
SQL AT 50, OR WHY THERE ARE NO RDBMS'S
In "Codd Almighty! Has it been half a century of SQL already?" the Register's Lindsay Clark interviews "Donald Chamberlin, Michael Stonebraker and more" about the legendary programming [sic] language. Chamberlin with Raymond Boyce were the authors of "the 1974 paper SEQUEL: A structured English query language as a way of addressing data in IBM's newly proposed System R, the first database to embody Edgar Codd's paper describing the relational model for database management.”
C. J. Date, who worked at IBM at the time, has often stated that the designers of SQL never understood RDM, and I expressed a similar stance in If You Liked SQL, You'll love XQuery. This has had an extremely detrimental effect on database technology--regress rather than progress--none of which transpires in the interview. So here is my reality check take on what you would not know from the interview.








