The Database Relational Model: A Retrospective Review and Analysis : A Historical Account and Assessment of E. F. Codd's Contribution to the Field of Database Technology

by C.J. Date

The Database Relational Model: A Retrospective Review and Analysis is a retrospective of E.F. Codd's original ideas in which C.J. Date revisits the original papers, highlights their critical contributions to the basis of relational database management systems, and discusses the current day applications of these ideas. Codd's relational model, first presented to the world in a series of research papers from 1969 to 1979, was at the time revolutionary. More than 30 years later, however, it seems that the database community in general has come to regard the relational model as somewhat passe and no longer relevant, even though the entire database industry is founded on that model. Two factors that might explain this are that several of Codd's original papers have since become hard to find, and some of his writings were somewhat difficult to read and understand. This book aims to clearly evaluate Codd's original ideas and relate them to today's database society.

Genres: Programming, Technical

Paperback

First published May 5, 2000

About the author

Christopher J. Date (born 1941) is an independent author, lecturer, researcher, and consultant, specializing in relational database theory.
—from wikipedia

Reviews

[Jerome Lusa · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is a thinly veiled critique, rather than review, of Codd’s seminal works. In place of direct quotes from Codd, we are left with Date’s paraphrasing. Of the 61 bibliographic references given, 27 are to Date’s own work and 2 are to pieces that he published jointly.

The book wastes a good amount of text on introspective commentary of the form: now I’m going to discuss… so I have discussed… as I previously discussed. This style might be understandable in the magazine articles from which the text was derived, as a means of maintaining continuity between issues. It is glaringly unnecessary in a short book of 139 pages. I expected a more comprehensive effort at re-editing those articles when published in book form.

There are several places where Date explicitly states the places where he has omitted related details. He also mentions great examples from Codd without including them. I would rather that he omitted the introspective commentary and instead supplied those details and Codd’s examples.

That said, an analytical reader should be able to deconstruct a reasonable ‘retrospective review and analysis’ of Codd’s inventions from this book, but should know at the start that the author’s seemingly self-promotion coupled with a unnecessarily introspective style might slow that effort.

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

It seemed to be a heavy mixture of criticism and egoism wrapped around the relational model definition of more than 40 years ago. I like the mathematical definition of the RM, but that credit can go to Codd, not Date. I'm sure this is a valuable critique to some...

[John Moss · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good reading for in-depth database design. I refer back to it quite often!